The first thing I looked for when I went to Hulu’s page for The Soup was the list of full episodes—someone had told me about a particular episode and I wanted to check it out. Scrolling down the page, though, I found only clips. My immediate reaction to discovering this fact was childish but came directly from my gut: I was pissed off. I wanted to see an episode of The Soup, I wanted to see it now, and now Hulu was standing in my way instead of making it easy for me like watching television online should be. Annoyed, I began to click away elsewhere while silently saying to myself, ‘I don’t care about their licensing predicaments and the intricacies of television broadcast rights—why can’t Hulu just get its act together and get this show so I can watch it?’

But then I noticed the little notice under the show banner.

It says, ‘Full episodes of The Soup are not available for online streaming at this time. We’ll continue to request them on our users’ behalf.‘ With those two little sentences, Hulu completely reversed the snap negative judgment I had hefted on the site. To the user, those sentences make it clear that not only is Hulu aware that this show is missing full episodes, but that they seem just as dissatisfied with the situation as I do. And what’s more, they’re working hard to change the situation.

The wording ‘on our user’s behalf’ is absolutely perfect for the intended effect. It made me feel like Hulu was on my side.

Users are unforgiving, and they’ll blame everything connected to your site on you even when those things are out of your control. So when something is out of your control, show the user you’re on their side. When you can’t give your users everything they want, commiserating goes a long way towards making them happy anyways.

Hulu goes a lot further than simply dumping boilerplate into this notice box. Many shows have descriptions of how many episodes are available for streaming at once, and when new episodes of the show will return if the show is on a hiatus.

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