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Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

That makes me think of how many times I've had to ask people "what does the error message on the screen say?" or tell my parents "the words that it says on the screen - read them, the program/website is trying to tell you something". When it comes to software many users are functionally illiterate because they don't even try to read alert windows or error messages, assuming that they will be meaningless.

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> they don't even try to read alert windows or error messages, assuming that they will be meaningless

I work in IT and I can assure you that software developers have been doing their best for the past 20 years to live up to that expectation.

I'm currently breaking my head trying to fix a "you didn't fill out all fields" error for a form with only hidden fields. I keep thinking how useful the message must be to the user.

I've made that gripe too, but there's something about error messages though that makes them very hard to take in. I don't know why, but I debug crap for a living, and I still every now and then find myself searching for a bug in Google, only to realise that there are instructions for resolving it in the error message.

I can't quite put my finger on why I can't adapt. It's some combination of the facts that 1) there's often a huge dump of information, much of it so technical that it's useful only to the developers, 2) it's fairly rare that it offers a truly useful suggestion, and 3) many of the messages I encounter ask me to do something that makes things easy for the developer rather than the user (update the software, contact the manufacturer).

I think it's something we as an industry ought to work harder on, because I don't think the failure is only in the users. I think, although I can't explain exactly why, we're communicating very poorly.

Yup, I've seen this a lot. This type of user basically operates like a script, they move through a memorized list of steps and when they can't go forward they simply throw an exception.

not even really an exception, they're more a like a PHP script that just ignores errors and continues

I still recall my father having various error messages from software (browsers, website, Word, etc), and when I'd translate them it was almost always a case of the error message being meaningful to me _but not in those words_, and so when I'd translate them for him he'd ask, "why didn't the error message say THAT?". It still is something I think about occasionally when trying to write logging or error messages -- how we got there, how to fix it, etc.

Can you give an example?

For a long time on Windows, I had to "copy" a complex directory structure, never use "move". A file lock could bork it.

No meaningful indication what file was locked. No meaningful indication what was locking the file. The process simply stopped.

It got much better after Win 8 onwards.

THIS.

So much this.

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