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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

I have experienced this in person with a developer who was failing to debug something. An error message was popping up on screen and he was reflexively clicking it away faster than anybody could read it. Even after being told “an error message is popping up, don’t dismiss it”, even after being told “[do the thing that triggers the bug] and then completely stop without doing anything else”, and a whole bunch of other ways of phrasing it, he was unable to understand that the error message contained useful information that we needed to see. I’m not even sure he was consciously aware it existed or that he was doing it. After many failed attempts at getting him to stop I literally had to take the mouse away from him and do it myself. I was shocked that apparently nothing anybody could say would stop him from dismissing the error message without even looking at it.

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I think this comes from the same problem as notifications on iPhones: if you dismiss them accidentally then it is very difficult to find out what it was.

It is missing the equivalent of the "history" in e.g. browsers and YouTube.

If a user dismisses an alertbox on desktop, why isn't there an history menu item that shows the previous 100 alert messages?

iOS has no (user-viewable) notification history?

Very limited: as soon as you have cleared a notification it is gone forever and old notifications are also gone rather quickly.

https://www.lifewire.com/iphone-notification-history-1189516...

It's so weird to me that this kind of thing wasn't a day-1 kind of thing. Android's has loads of issues too[1], not least of which is that you need to manually enable it.

1: you can't get access to actions or details in the history (e.g. no long-press to change settings), nor does it show you ones you didn't dismiss by hand afaict (I've been having Discord notifications disappearing almost immediately after making a noise, but there's nothing in history even though I saw it for its whole half-second existence because it popped over my screen).

That may be an issue for messages from people but almost anything that pops up because the computer wants to tell you is useless and certainly doesn't need to be findable later. If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do. Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code but we think users are somehow less deserving of respect and ready to drop everything to deal with some stupid notification telling them they did it wrong or the software is broken like a crying child demanding his mother knows that he hurt his finger.

Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful. It is often easier to mindlessly trial-and-error your way around obstacles than waste your attention on them.

> Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code

I have no idea why you think this. The only reason I wouldn't like it is because I might be doing something that requires incorrect code as a placeholder, but if the modal didn't come back after being dismissed (and just sat in a history) I'd be pleased as punch. It's why I moved to rust - I wanted the compiler to stop me.

Not only do you think this, but you think it's somehow a sign of being egotistical and disrespectful that anyone would like to know when they're screwing up. Weird.

> they're almost always unhelpful.

Sounds like you found the real problem.

> If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do.

As I explained earlier, what we were actually trying to do was debug the problem, and reading the error message was a necessary part of that.

It’s weird you’ve cooked up this little fantasy that the error message was getting in the way when it was the most important thing in the whole process and that was the entire point of the anecdote.

> Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful.

Not when you’re trying to debug the problem the error message is telling you about!

I'm justifying (via spleen venting) why someone would have the habit of reflexively closing popups without reading them. That that habit carries on even in the rare case where it would help is separate but shows how strong it can be.

By the way, I've seen the exact same thing in a student I was teaching how to use computers. He was asking me what's wrong and demonstrated that an error popped up, which he immediately closed - several times in a row! At the time I thought he wasn't really trying to solve it himself so he didn't bother with the message but now I realize it's just how people have reasonably adapted to the obnoxious way computers keep jumping in front of you screaming for attention.

I don't agree with much of the above but I do agree that we should endeavor to minimize error notifications and the like because people don't read them. We (as programmers) should endeavor to make things "self-heal" or work in such a way that most people don't have these kinds of notifications interrupt them. E.g. if "error X" happens a lot find a way to make the action that causes "error X" work without an error. Easier said than done though.

As an aside I really like video games that have a running log of everything characters have said. Persona 5 does this. It's a rare feature from my experience!

Almost everyone has this popup dismissal reflex. People don't read them and click or tap them away instinctively. I think software creators should know this by now and stop using popups in their software.

Sometimes the reflex is so strong, it is extremely hard to stop it, even when you're aware of it. Something like that has happened to me once. There was some kind of password form, where it said DO NOT PRESS ENTER after typing the password. I pressed enter. It took me several attempts to get through it.

I'm guilty of dismissing useful messages sometimes, so I'm running a program, RetroClip for macOS, that records the last 30/60 seconds of screen capture into a ring buffer in RAM (with compression, but the CPU/GPU/power usage seems to be almost negligible). It writes out a file when you press a hotkey. Very helpful in these "wait, wtf did just happen" situations.

That's even worse than the "I'm getting an error when I ..." type! ("...ok... What's the error?")

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