How might we help customers get back on track from a connection timeout message

Question

I'm designing 'sad path' scenarios for checkout and I'm trying to design for helping customers when a connection timeout occurs when the checkout hangs trying to connect to our 3rd party credit card payment form.

When this happens the credit payment form could not get loaded in our checkout environment.

A simple solution is to reload the page.

The UX/UI solution I'm putting forward is an alert message that appears on the page and asks the customer to reload the page.

This is my attempt at making the error message more 'user-friendly':

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A connection error occurred

An error occurred when we were trying to connect to the system.

Please reload the page to try connecting again.

[ Reload page ] <--- button

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How do people feel about the above message? Any other solutions you can think of?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Your message is probably sufficient, though depending on your brand tone and voice you might consider giving it a little personality.

More importantly, if they can actually DO anything about it - such as clearing their caches, checking their connections, checking uptime status of your services, just waiting five minutes, etc. - tell them what those options are. There's nothing worse than being dead-ended repeatedly and having no recourse; it leads to abandonment and bad juju if people are confronted with repeated errors, not enough info, and no way to progress.

I don't know how often you expect people to encounter this issue, but if it's something that might happen more than once during a session to a user, you also might consider including a "Contact us if this keeps happening" type of button, for the same reason.

If you don't think it's likely to happen much, you could display any Contact Us and/or "How to fix this/what to expect" information only if it happens a second time in the same session.

Also, is this a server-side or client-side timeout? For the geeky sorts it might do to include the error code somewhere, and perhaps a little more detail about the error, and it might help inform what actions you propose they take to fix things (or at least what to expect).

Hope that helps a little!