If your intended audience is nontechnical you find yourself at a severe risk that your users will plain ignore the carefully worded error messages, either staring in shock at them, calling and yelling at your support staff or simply ignore and/or close them.
I'm wondering what good practices you recommend for getting the users to actually read your error messages instead of disposing of them. Now I know some basics such as:
- Short precise wording, possibly with a link or button to a detailed explanation.
- Provide an example of what to do to rectify the error (e.g. "Unable to connect to the server. Please check your Internet connection.").
Answer
The book About Face 3 has some good advice. The paramount of which is to design the software to eliminate the need for error dialogs. In cases where that isn't possible, the authors recommend:
- Make an error dialog polite, illuminating, and helpful. (Remember that the error message is actually the software reporting it's inability to perform, not the user's inability to enter valid data, for example)
- Illuminate the problem, giving relevant information the user needs to make a plan to solve the program's problem
- Offer to implement at least one suggested solution (my perspective: on Windows, take advantage of the built-in Windows Troubleshooting Platform, even though implementing it can be maddening :))
By far, the biggest take-away is to work very hard to avoid error messages altogether. Whether that's by implementing an Undo feature, or by offering alternative UI or inputs when an error condition occurs, or something else altogether.
No comments:
Post a Comment