atw: Re: Structure of Error Messages
- From: Stuart Burnfield <sburnf@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 14:26:20 +0800
> Can anyone recommend a website or offer some advice regarding the
> appropriate structure of error messages.
This is maybe a bit less practical and more philosophical
than you want, but it's food for thought:
http://www.stcsig.org/usability/newsletter/9801-errormessages.html
The main thing to remember is that whatever the message says,
it has to give the user whatever information they need to help them
decide what to do next. Usually this boils down to:
- Try the same thing again
- Try something different
- You can't fix this; contact X
This advice might seem obvious but a surprising number of error
messages are really debugging messages (useful only to the
programmer) or dead-end signs:
"A bad thing just happened!
[OK]
---
Stuart Burnfield
Information Developer
Australian Programming Centre
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