I like your very last comment to David… Too often I find that when we [marketing/ usability/ design people] miss something like an error message, the development team just puts in their own message without funnelling it back up. Now if the developers were trained on best practices and knew how to place and write these messages that may not be a problem but ideally the working relationship should make them comfortable funnelling this “ommission” back over the wall so it can be addressed by the people who are tasked with insuring the site is usable.

There clearly is no “pre-emptive” validation going on, as you can see by http://www.cre8media.com/images/boutique_wines.jpg and how I was able to add 12,345,678,901,234,567,890 bottles to my cart. I’m sure even having a limit of 9,999 would suffice. Or better yet, what about doing the math for me and converting 25 bottles into 2 cases and 1 bottle? That’s the kind of stuff that differentiates your site from the dozens of other wine sites out there.

The product folks could also put the 6 bottle requirement in the winery description at the top of the page, http://www.boutiquewineries.com.au/content/winery.cfm?id=1459 vs. buried at the bottom.

@David, true, the marketing/design guys probably didn’t account for error messages beforehand. But that shouldn’t get developers and QA folks off the hook either. They too, should be hip to best practices (send them a link to this blog!).

I think that a great product team will design for both the positive scenario (user thinks like us and follows OUR approach) and the scenarios when the user does not follow instructions or proper procedures. When somebody gets an error message it is, in the customer service world, the classic moment of truth – will this company help me in my time of need or fail me.

Your example shows a failure. But think about if the error message was a visual with a half-empty wine glass and a big message that said “We would love to sell you one bottle, but in this case the glass is half empty as the vendor will only sell in lots of X. We hope you will consider increasing your order or looking at our fine selection of other similar wines.” We’re humans, we make errors – good designers account for and plan for that in help us in our moment of need!

Definitely a good point. While there’s always a new method to test, I don’t suspect this site, or many, had testing in mind when they put their error messages in place. Ignoring convention when it comes to errors tends to be a bad thing yet a lot of sites do it. I can’t understand why people resist using red, putting the message at the top of the page or on a subsequent page — understandably it impacts the design asthetics but from a usability point of view but that’s where it’s expected and few things are more likely to make me bail than not finding the error or reason why the checkout process is failing — except perhaps when the error makes no sense (”Could not process request” in 24 point red font won’t help me at all).

What I mean by “Give your customers what they want” is not to allow them to order less than 6 bottles if this is your policy but rather present your customers with a “Proceed to Checkout” button. On the following page you can have an error message explaining why their order could not be processed, but the key lies in providing the error message (or any information that is) in a format that your customers are familiar with, or expect. In such a situation, if the error messages had been in red type at the top of the active window, I believe that this confusion would have been avoided. By providing your customers with a format that they expect, they are more likely to move seamlessly through your site and that is a win-win for both you and your shoppers.

Hope this helps clarify!

Thanks for the write up…
In your comment “Give your customers what they want”…

Are you suggesting that the customer should be allowed to order less than 6 bottles? Or are you suggesting that the “Update Total” button correct the number of ordered items? Or, perhaps, both?

Thanks in advance