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Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Which file?!?!?!
Anyway, I disagree strongly on the technical jargon. Ok, if it's not really an error and the user can retry or similar sure.
But if it's bad times, an exception or similar, don't care about the user. Instead include as much detail as you need. A non-technical user won't be able to do anything anyway, and a sanitized error message means support or a technical user has a much harder time figuring out what the real issue might be, in order to work around it.
Failed to load a shared library? State the filename and exact error code and message, and anything else that might be useful. And so on.
If you’re SaaS vendor you should give troubleshooting information to your support team skipping the user. User should get “our support team received the error” and support should handle it directly.
“Something went wrong, try again later” is also acceptable but only if support team gets info about it and user really ca just try later.
In fact I would generally bet thousands of dollars against that.
Oh good, I guess I’ll expect to hear back never.
I think it’s a good thought but we’ve been conditioned that these things are black holes. User should have all agency in escalating or continuing troubleshooting rather than implied wait for deus ex machina from the support team.
What support team? The ones that were all not hired in the first place, and if they were hired then they were replaced by AI? The same support team that customers simply cannot reach at all?
Sounds very useful.
With how powerful Ghidra is now, I'm not sure that it matters much any more.
As a sysadmin (having spent 30 years dealing with desktop software) the attitude of the people who gave you that direction make me seethe with anger. Crackers gonna crack. That just hurts the people who have to make the product work in their environment.
I wrote a blog post about this recently: https://landaire.net/reverse-engineering-with-ai/
Just yesterday I completely reverse engineered several proprietary audio codecs from a game without even having to touch the static analysis tool myself.
I'm not against the considerations of the article regarding the user and its state of mind, but please do add as much technical detail as possible!
Even if an error message is a cryptic error code, that's better than a "Something went wrong" message. This is not better, or even friendlier, UX. An error code can be referenced, can be searched on the internet, can be passed around on a ticket or on a call... add parameters to your error template, reference the name of the file, the item name that does not respond, the HTTP error code... just give the user some transparency, some agency. Help the client build up a mental model of the error: when / how / why might it be happening.
But yes, I can get behind making things nicer to read and less technically scary, but include enough detail so that people can solve their own problems if needed. There's a decent chance that the software will outlive your desire to support it.
First, appropriate tone depends heavily on the product or service in question. A bank or otherwise serious business should probably not be giving messages like "whoops, something went wrong". But an entertainment product could have those sorts of messages, and treat it as part of the overall experience.
Secondly, I'm not a huge fan of error messages that don't give actionable feedback for how to fix the issue. Yes, a lot of users don't need that sort of information, but some sort of error code or technical reference can be handy for more involved support processes.
So, if the product or service is business orientated, maybe have that info in a dropdown box or something, where a support agent can ask the user to find it if an issue keeps occurring. And of course, if the product or service is aimed at technical people (like an open source infrastructure project), maybe just skip the casual language and just get to the point.
I didn't break it!!! Reddit is down and your server is overloaded.
Regarding the proposed "good" alternative, it has less actionable information than the original "bad" message, depending on what the product is and who its users are. In particular, you can't determine whether "fetch data" is impenetrable jargon without looking at the product itself and its users.
I also frequently see people use the designation of a user as non-technical as an excuse to dismiss their intelligence. It's true that tech folks generally underestimate how confusing computers and software are to the average person, but erring too heavily in the other direction also has negative impacts for accessibility. Either way, you can at least hide away that extra detail, with jargon and all, using that link tip she mentioned.
Finally, this writer seems to overestimate the extent to which most users view "contact Customer Care" as "giving them a way out" and not an invitation for further aggravation.