Totally. So often, the message that comes out on a "this should never happen" branch of the code is a random invention of a junior coder, and never reviewed by anyone.
> be clear about what someone can do to fix it.
"Sorry, an error has occurred."
i.e. All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
When Airdrop doesn’t work, it just gets stuck. No timeout, no nothing. I guess that’s very clean from a UX writing perspective because you don’t even need an error message. But it’s extremely frustrating to the user.
The iOS Family features suffer a similar lack of feedback. I toggle an app limit for my child and sometimes it just secretly doesn’t register on the server. I navigate back and forth to see the UI action hasn’t taken effect.
(Often I wonder if anybody at Apple actually has kids because Family works incredibly poorly. 30-second delays are common. Notifications don’t come through. User flows go through confusing incorrect states. Etc. Feels like it’s maintained on leftover MobileMe infra by junior developers who have no idea why anyone would even use this product.)
Even when Airdrop works, it doesn't work. One "feature" of Airdrop is that if you try to airdrop something from your iPhone to your iPad, for example, but you had already airdropped it earlier, it won't give you ANY indication. It will make a nice ping sound, and just do nothing. This is so infuriating.
Also I suspect many of those issues you're seeing involve asynchronous behaviour which is a hard UX challenge to solve. You could send a push notification that an update has failed on the server but often the user has moved onto something else.
Sure, async UI is hard, but the world's richest corporation with a reputation for UX excellence could afford to try at least.
And why does Support and Marketing push back on that idea? Because they don't like when a customer reaches Support and says "I got error #12345! What should I do?" They'd much rather the customer just shut up and go away
however, the programmer who put 12345 in the code would dearly love to know that it was hit.
If it successfully adds to library, it doesn’t just do nothing, it gives you a “Added to Library” thing
Am I supposed to remember that as a user? Will support know what the error code means?
Genuinely curious why some generic error messages (e.g. "Something happened") include these error codes.
From a comment I’ve made about errors in the past:
“You should probably include the error code in the message (ERR0231), because that helps make the error message unique to this specific error situation and thus makes it functional as a “gathering point”. If you Google the error message and find others talking about the same error you experienced, that’s useful; if you Google the error message and find others talking about different errors on the same site, that is useless at best and could be harmful. (Concrete example: a multiplayer gaming platform reports a checksum of game files to a remote server to ensure all players are using the same version of the game. Scenario 1: The files are corrupt, the checksum is wrong, the error message is “Unable to validate game files”, the fix is to reinstall the game. Scenario 2: The user’s internet connection is temporarily degraded, the game is unable to get a response from the remote server, the error message is “Unable to validate game files”, the fix is to wait until connection improves. The unfortunate user from Scenario 2 is going to google their error message and get told to try the fix from Scenario 1. Now they’re re-downloading the game on their spotty connection.)“
In other cases, an error code may be a standard value, and indicate that something is wrong with the inputs I provided as a user. If I see "Error saving file: 13", I may guess that the "13" was returned by some system call and is the error code EACCES or "Permission denied". I could test this by saving the file in another directory. The specific error code is useful for knowing what to do next, as error code 28 would be ENOSPC or "No space left on device", and I'd instead check if I ran out of disk space. (It would have been better if the error number had been passed through strerror() before display, but having the numeric code is still better than nothing.)
Sometimes, errors happen because a whole chain of behaviour failed. The program is in a bad, irrecoverable state or contains a bug. The user can't fix it and the programmer that made the method may not even know the state can be impossible (i.e. code has been refactored).
Sometimes, error codes are more about helping the developers pinpoint a bug than they're about helping the user.
That said, things like "database corrupt" or "no connection to API server" should just be displayed rather than muffled away.
In my opinion, these impossible error codes should be accompanied with a support phone number or email address.
The “something happened” part usually comes from a generic error handler that reports surprising errors. E.g. your current graphics card driver messes with directx internals in a way that the game couldn’t foresee this sort of exception in that code path. So here you go, “unknown error 0x8000abcd”. Google it -> update your driver.
I've had worse though, when a UX design specified a specific error message and a developer blindly followed it and simply remapped errors to the given message, ignoring what the actual error was, misleading the users and the developers. I've told UX to never include error messages again..
No, Support won't know, but they can pass the information on.
So usually it's up to the reviewer to notice and guide the author to that improvement.
No need to blame interns or junior coders, this is done by big corporations after going through reviews and design iterations too.
Guru Meditation!