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Adam Kalsey

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User Experience

More useless error messages

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This blog post is over 21 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.

1 Jul 2003

User frustration rides high when a program gives a useless error message. Not only is the error message unhelpful, but sort of scary. “Money can’t be closed?” Do you mean not now because there was an error, or ever?

Perhaps it would be better to give the user some clue as to why they are getting the error so that they can fix the problem.

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