Random krep
Feb. 26th, 2005 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progI 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.
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?
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.
Mmm, pizza. Note the desert. (Only a subset of my audience will get this.)
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?
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.
Mmm, pizza. Note the desert. (Only a subset of my audience will get this.)
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pizza
Date: 2005-02-27 11:38 pm (UTC)