How Do You Get Users To Read Error Messages?

A BOFH writes "The longer I do desktop support, the more it becomes obvious that my users don't read anything that appears on their screen. Instead, they memorize a series of buttons to press to get whatever result they want and if anything unexpected happens, they're completely lost. Error logs help a lot, but they have their limits. I've been toying with a few ideas, but I don't know if any of them will work and I was hoping my fellow Slashdotters could point me in the right direction. For example, I was thinking about creating icons or logos to identify specific errors. They might not remember that an error is about 'uninitialized data' but they might be more able to remember that they got the 'puppy error' if I showed a puppy picture next to the error message. Or for times when finding images is too time consuming, you could create simple logos from letters, numbers, symbols, colors, or shapes, so you could have the 'red 5' error or 'blue square' error (or any combination of those elements). I've even wondered if it would be possible to expand that to cover the other senses, for example, playing a unique sound with the error. Unfortunately, haptic and olfactory feedback aren't readily available. I like to think that my users would remember the error that caused them to get a swift kick in the balls. And if they forgot it anyhow, I could always help them reproduce it. Does anyone else have experience with ideas like these? Did it work?"

Comments

Re:Electric Shock

[postbigbang]

You figured out part of the problem.

1) women have no balls, so kicking them in a non-existent part of their anatomy is gruesomely stupid; how droll for the poster to think in this way at all-- this person is likely incurable of this level of sexism.
2) the proposed puppy icons are apologies for the poster's poor and inarticulate error messages; say something in actual genuine non-geek speak to render actual information transfer between application and user when things aren't working. One can assume very little about the training level of the person being supported.
3) no one RTFMs, so start from there.... and people will indeed read maps of where they might be and want to go within an application
4) help systems are often incapable of English language heuristic/contextual answers that lead to problem solving by the user. Some coders believe that it's more important to make their user community dependent on them and therefore guarantee a job for the life cycle of the app than to think through adapting Murphy's Law to their apps.

And now that I've poured kerosene on the floor, feel free to ignite it by modding me flamebait. Hating your users gets you nowhere.

Re:Do away with them

[mcgrew]

"User error: Please replace user and try again."

This is EXACTLY what's wrong with software; the idea that it's the user who's dumb, and is exactly what I don't like about MS software. If your program is going to crash if the user wants ten items out of eight, don't allow more than eight.

There are many unknowns that can happen. Hardware failures,

Which should affect every piece of software there and shouldn't be your concern

memory corruption,

Again, this is the hardware vendor and especially OS vendor's responsibility.

OS doing something it shouldn't,

You need to read the OS docs more carefully, and if their docs are shitty, write for a different OS.

the malware on the system is interfering,

Oh, you're writing for Windows? Sucks to be you. But seriously, that's not your responsibility; Microsoft need to make sure its malwars isn't biting it's developers.

the vendor changed the API behind the scenes

You have a shitty vendor, maybe you should use a different development platform? The problem is that everybody is shipping utter crap knowing they can always blame somebody else.