Random krep

[prog]

I picked up the venusian death flu at last weekend's SF marathon, so have been more cloistered than usual. Oh, I still have to do a film writeup, don't I? I've been too narrow-focused on work for it. Not too much longer.

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Non-technical endusers tend not to pay attention to error messages. That is, they recognize that an error message means that something has gone wrong, but they don't attempt to extract any further semantic meaning from it. I have had this conversation or its functional equivalent more times than I can count (including this weekend):

"Hey, I tried to do [foo] and it gave me an error."
"What kind of error?"
"I don't know. Should I go back and check?"
"Yes please."

I wonder (assuming my observation is valid) why this is. The assumption that any information provided by a machine in an "error state" can't be at all helpful, since it's broken by definition?

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If I designed Harvest Moon I'd make it so the chickens would get mad at you if you picked up their eggs and then immediately ate them while they watched, especially given the satisfied little yum-yum animation your guy does when he eats stuff (including raw eggs). But this is an optimally efficient strategy, at least until you buy a kitchen. I wince when I do it.

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Mmm, pizza. Note the desert. (Only a subset of my audience will get this.)

Comments

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Simpler: the error message is long and impossible to memorize. There's no way to figure out which parts are meaningful. User figures that no matter *what* he says, you'll ask for more information -- and then at least he'll know what information is important to report.

(For non-technical people, this can even true even of "System Error 33". But error messages are usually "helpful" these days, so it's more likely to be "The file could not be saved because: system error 33." And if the user says "It gave me an error 33", you're going to ask "System error 33, kernel error 33, or fault 33? And what was the message before that? What color was the word 'because'? Damn users, can't even give them two rocks to pound together.")

[dougo.livejournal.com]

The user might also have assumed (or hoped) that prog knew about the error (or at least knew what error might occur from doing [foo]) and didn't bother to try to memorize the message.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I tried to make a Mamma Mia joke in response to that picture but I couldn't figure out how to phrase it.

[keimel.livejournal.com]

And sometimes even the technical don't read the error message. The first time. :) I am often guilty of this when dealing with windows issues.

pizza

[temvald.livejournal.com]

wow--i'm impressed that they got far enough into the game to have that many pepper segments with the robber still on the mushrooms.