"We couldn't find that site."
"We're just updating your computer."
Perhaps I'm just an old fogey, but passive voice feels like the only right choice:
"The site could not be found."
"Your computer is being updated."
The insertion of "We" feels like an imposition; the company who wrote the code reaching in and enacting their will with your equipment, using your screen as their soapbox. It's icky.
And without "we", there can of course be no "we apologize".
Honestly it was fine enough for a YouTube error, "we couldn't find that video." But then everyone started copying it, including Microsoft who, in Windows 8, updated the blue screen of death to have a "whoopsie poopsie! Your computer has a widdle boo boo!" type message, accented with a :( sad face emoticon.
Which I can guarantee was presented to countless people who lost real work. I'm sure they found that real reassuring.
This predated the annoying :( which I think would have led him to break the computer after the second try
Back then the I-cannot-program-my-VCR crowd used to call tech support and scream about all the "egghead nonsense gobbledygook" on their screen. And since there's orders of magnitude more of them than there are people ready to fire up their kernel debugger and make use of that info, guess which tack the UX took?
Your client does not have permission to get URL / from this server. _That’s all we know._
But yeah, it also feels like "we (Google) don't care that much about your problem here, because nobody is going to improve this software to give you a more meaningful explanation".
You don't get tempted to talk in terms of "we" when you are doing software that is controlled by its user. But policing the language won't achieve anything either.
"Whoops, sorry! This wasn't what you were looking for!"
"Oops! You broke the internet. We are trying to fix it."
"Are you lost? Let us help you home (link to home page)"
https://www.callbruno.com/en/404
Just treat me like an adult and tell me what's wrong. Preferably with a googleable error code.
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34812857
What kind of shallow charicature of a tough guy do you have to be that seeing colours makes you feel like a baby and that cheerful is a bad thing, something to be stopped?
> "Besides the obvious inappropriateness"
Obvious?? All tools should be monochrome, and everyone should feel like they work in a funeral parlour? If it was supposed to be cheerful it wouldn't be called work? It must have been the colourful offices[1] which stopped Google from making any money, I guess?
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=google+offices&iax=images&i...
Is it so surprising that people expect tools they use for business to look and act professionally?
Actually, that was a pretty reasonable translation of this line into low-brow speech:
> a broader, ongoing software infantilization process. Colors can't be sober either, everything has to be colorful, cheerful
The connection between these sentences is fairly clear: software is being infantilized and part of that is that everything has to be colorful and cheerful. Hence OP's translation into "seeing colours makes you feel like a baby and cheerful is a bad thing".
The translation into more casual language was rhetorically valuable in that it accentuated their broader point about how stuffy the original author sounds.
(And yes, I'm intentionally using stuffy language here because the casual language OP used seems to have whooshed.)
Seems both more likely and more charitable.
> "may go hand in hand with designs that treat the user as inept"
May, may not. Is orthogonal to.
> "I don't like being treated as inept or incapable."
What a chain of reasoning. "I don't like being treated as inept (fine), so to remind myself how capable I am I need to not look at colours otherwise I will fantasize that other people are laughing at me (not fine)".
First, it's not that the UI is colorful, it's that many designers seem unwilling to make UIs that are monotone or subdued. That's different from disliking color for whatever reason.
The designer choosing that certain (more monotone) color schemes are not permitted could be conflated with designers making other decisions on behalf of the user, such as assuming the user would prefer fewer options for the sake of simplicity. ("Treating the user as inept")
I don't know what the OP meant exactly, but I still find your 'translation' uncharitable.
I personally like both brightly colored things, as well as more muted color schemes, depending on the situation. I don't personally think colors equate to childishness.
I can however empathize with someone unhappy that their personal aesthetic preference seems underrepresented, and feels that UI designers are making more choices on their behalf than they'd prefer.
That needs some citations. "Dark mode" is the theme du decade. Most things have dark modes or night modes - operating systems, productivity tools, websites, chat programs, game menus, developer tools, browser chrome, mobile and desktop, traditional and apps.
> "The designer choosing that certain (more monotone) color schemes are not permitted could be conflated with designers making other decisions on behalf of the user, such as assuming the user would prefer fewer options for the sake of simplicity. ("Treating the user as inept")"
If you're exhorting me to have a charitable interpretation of the above comments, why aren't you taking a charitable interpretation of the designer's intent? [And why is fewer options connected to 'inept'? Do you feel inferior when there's only one lightswitch in a room instead of 8? Because somehow more options automatically means more competence? In any situation, the amount of possible options is enormous and the amount of useful ones is a tiny part of it; the most likely thing is that more options are acreted by lack of design and kitchen-sink driven development and are useless or time wasting, rather than considered and useful].
> "I don't know what the OP meant exactly, but I still find your 'translation' uncharitable."
> "I don't personally think colors equate to childishness."
Then why are you defending the claim that they do?
[1] as much as I used to
Without wanting to put words into gp's mouth. I assume because he understands that different people have different preferences. And some don't want to get forced into other peoples preferences. Actually, gp said it directly:
> I can however empathize with someone unhappy that their personal aesthetic preference seems underrepresented, and feels that UI designers are making more choices on their behalf than they'd prefer.
The worst offender I have found is Lemonade Insurance which doesn’t even tack on the obligatory “bug fixes and performance improvements” at the end.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lemonade-insurance/id105565364...
If I visit a website, "They" broke.
If my phone crashes, "It" broke.
My phone shouldn't say "we" - I don't grok the idea of people in there.
The website should say "we" - It's an organization presenting data, and I do believe there are people behind it.
My car shouldn't say "we" - My car is an "it", a thing that lives in my garage and I drive around.
NVIDIA drivers shouldn't say "we" - I'm running the program. I'm the agent. If anything, when I check for drivers, it should say "they have an update ready". The program is executing on my machine. It's mine. "They" are the people who publish updates. "We" (program and I) go fetch and install them.
But programs don't have agency - so if "it" can't fetch "their" update, then "Update could not be fetched" conveys all the info I need to know.
Then there's the "simpy" problem of always apologizing. For this reason I like TFA's final recommendation:
> Use the word “sorry” only in error messages that result in serious problems for the user (for example, data loss or inability to use the computer). Don’t apologize if the issue occurred during the normal functioning of the program (for example, if the user needs to wait for a network connection to be found).
Some years ago, the Google Voice app for Android would put a message in the notification bar whenever there was even the most brief connectivity issue (which in the early days of 3G on android was frequent) starting off with "We have a problem ... <connnecting to your google voice account or something>". Considering that I used that GV number for two highly regulated activities with potential high liability, my heart would skip a beat every time a pull out my phone and see "We have a problem".
I think that using "we" and "apologizing" is fair for most user-facing applications. It's kind of like the old adage: the customer is always right. Obviously the user wanted to accomplish something, and tried something to achieve it, but your software couldn't figure out what they wanted or didn't have enough information to do it, etc. So, it's kind of like a store clerk saying "I'm sorry; we're all out of that color dress."
Now, I would say this kind of "polite", human-centric, UI is not appropriate for e.g., sysadmin stuff like coreutils. I think it's perfectly fine if `cat /some/file` errors by saying "That file doesn't exist. Get bent."
Also, just to inject some unrelated cynicism... To your example about updating, I think with how pushy companies like Microsoft are with updates, it might actually be more accurate for them to say "We are updating your computer and enacting our will with your equipment."
And that BS is exactly why we have all those entitled adult babies now.
Love the proposed solution. And yet Linux will never be ready for the desktop because you need the command line to fix problems...
However, I can also see a case for the other point of view. In working on large enterprise systems that are being used by users who are not technical, the "we" helps reinforce the idea that things aren't outside of the users locus of control. There is an whole group of people employed by the organization behind the scenes that are part of the way the overall system works. So the "we" emphasizes that the system, the error, the people who write the system, the person trying to use the system, are all part of whatever they are trying to do together.
I still use "we" whenever I'm emailing clients, except now it's to sound like there is more than just me in this dept.
What about passive voice for the software error, then apologize with we in the name of whoever developed that software?
Strictly professionally, of course.
Rubs me up the wrong way, because there would be no way to identify who the individual apologising is.
However, I think error messages should apologise in the rare situation that there is no constructive, helpful, language-neutral way to convey an actionable response in an error.
I'm curious to know which line/operator you've heard this on.
I've got my own pet-peeve automated announcement though: "This is a National Rail security announcement..." Oh no! Is there a riot on the platform? Was someone assaulted? No, listen further: "...If you see something that doesn't look right, text the British Transport Police on 61016".
Like, that's not even a real announcement, and doesn't every passenger know the number by now??
P.S. I feel that it's right to note for those unfamiliar with the English railways that GWR are probably the most effective train operator in England, and that the delay I had wasn't their fault. Eurostar, having almost exclusive use of HS1 and the Channel Tunnel, don't have that excuse available, but they were still impeccablely professional.
But they are reaching into your computer and enacting their will. The passive voice strikes me as even ickier when it is used to amorphously shift blame into the ether. I would much rather read "sorry, we fucked and formatted your harddisk because we suck at programming" than "an error occurred and all your data is gone". Take some damn responsibility.
"site not found"
"software updating"
edit: better: "update in progress"
"site cannot be found"
"software is updating"/"updating is in progress"
- a gerund form which is always the same as the infinitive,
- a different gerund form (verb-'ung', kind of cognate to verb-'ing', both derived from a Latin construct I believe), and
- a present participle
...in addition to the other declensions. It's fascinating to me how Dutch and English can be seen as two parallel derivatives of the old High German language, where as what we now call German has developed along a largely different path!
It's also interesting to think of how to describe the semantic difference between the -en and -ung nouns when both do exist. I think one case is that the -ung can often describe the result of completing the action of the verb or in some sense refer to a "complete instance" or "complete occasion" of the verb's action, but this is generalizing from just a few examples...
> forms nouns from verbs, usually describing either an event in which an action is carried out, or the result of that action.
> Note that the -ung suffixed form is different from the gerund which is formed by simply capitalizing the first letter of the verb. The gerund usually refers to the activity in general rather than a specific instance or result.
I tried this to get all of the dictionary pairs for comparison:
import re
german = set(open("/usr/share/dict/ngerman").read().split())
english = set(open("/usr/share/dict/words").read().split())
tech_de = "ung"
gerund_de = "en"
tech_en = "tion"
gerund_en = "ting"
for word in sorted(list(german)):
if word[0].isupper() and word.endswith(tech_de):
gerund = re.sub(tech_de + "$", gerund_de, word)
if gerund in german:
print(word, gerund)
print()
for word in sorted(list(english)):
if word[0].islower() and word.endswith(tech_en):
gerund = re.sub(tech_en + "$", gerund_en, word)
if gerund in english:
print(word, gerund)
I put a sample output of this up at https://sethschoen.com/gerund-comparison.txt in case anyone wants to look at it (not promising to keep it there forever!). (Note the default character encoding from the web server is wrong so you may have to change encodings manually, or download the file and reopen it, to see German umlaut characters correctly.)
Amidst cyberspace vast,
Site elusive, lost in void,
Unreachable code.
(I could swear that one of these appeared in BeOS' NetPositive browser if you visited a site without network access... but now I'm not so sure.)
Edit: now I'm sure: https://8325.org/haiku/
"Errors have occurred.
We won't tell you where or why.
Lazy programmers."
Thank you for sharing them :)
This is particularly annoying when error messages are written from the point of view of an entity or fictitious person, e.g. "Sorry, I wasn't able to..." but things on screen are labeled "My..." Is "me" the user or the software?
>"Your computer is being updated."
But without the we, it is all passive voice. My English professors in college all hated passive voice.