As I was applying for a human-interactions-engineer job at Yahoo, their system crashed on me. Ironic, isn’t it? The error message said: “Oops! Something’s not right. We’re constantly updating the site and would like to know what went wrong.”

I have to give them props for trying to make this experience humorous and going above the standard message of “Error: try again later”. However, there always could be room for improvement!

Wouldn’t it be great if the website could track my actions, and then determined the reason for failure for me? Then, instead of asking my feedback in some contact form, it could just ask me to confirm whether indeed I performed the A-B-C actions (that it thought I performed), adjust its reasoning based on my feedback and then send it off in a form of a ‘corrective action’ statement. It would’ve been awesome -no need for me to explain what really happened, while equal or more participation on my part. It would’ve been a win-win both way!