Uh Oh! The Infantilization of Failure

When a friend says "oops" after spilling coffee, they're performing a specific social ritual. The diminutive acknowledges fault while signaling that the harm was minor and unintentional. "Oops" calibrates expectations downward: this is small, forgivable, already passing. The word does real work in human relationships. Corporate interfaces borrowed this vocabulary wholesale; and they understood exactly what they were doing. When an app says "Oops!" after failing to process your request, it's attempting to inhabit the friend-who-spilled-coffee role. But the app isn't your friend. The company behind it has a contractual relationship with you, often involving money, and the mismatch creates a specific irritation that's hard to articulate until you notice it.

I worked on an app for a billion dollar corporation. The initial designs called for “Oops!” to be the title of every error message.

I remember feeling uneasy about it, but I haven’t been able to articulate why until reading this article.