“The best error message is the one that never shows up” 
— Thomas Fuchs

I've never taken error messages that seriously,
now I think they can decide whether a user leans towards your app or some other one, let me tell you why.

This weekend I wanted to start a new TV Series, I checked Netflix out and did not find anything interesting so I checked Amazon Prime Video and found a cool series there and hit play... An error then appeared:

"This video can't be played"

I thought "crap this is unfortunate...", and decided to go back to Netflix and watch some crap show instead, I then realized there was some error with my connection and it didn't work either.

This is the thing... because Amazon said that the video could not be played, I guessed they meant in general, like if it was restricted by location or something... so I decided not to use their service.

 Some examples

Here is an example of a really bad error:

“Something happened”
Microsoft, Windows 10

To wrap things up

An error message can be critical, it is really different to say:

"This video can't be played"

as opposed to

"This video can't be played at the moment, please check your internet connection"