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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.

Comments

Adam Gaffin
July 2, 2003 7:15 AM

As long as we're at it, let's get rid of all the popup boxes that make you click "OK" when there's no other option.

Adam Kalsey
July 2, 2003 8:40 AM

I once got an error window that had "Error" in the title and the only other thing on the window was an OK button. I wish I'd thought of taking a screen shot.

Dan
July 2, 2003 10:57 AM

Amen. Error messages that have error codes that you don't know actually create a worse situation because you have to take time to learn what error description correlates to the error code. No doubt, the findability of that data table is ultra low.

This discussion has been closed.

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