Hot answers tagged error-message
216
The reason I believe it is important to have an apologetic tone is to ensure you are communicating to the user that, though a mistake has been made and he is interacting with a machine or application in this case, you still respect his action and are humanizing the mistake.
To quote this article from UXMatters:
“You’re going to display your error ...
51
While Mervin's answer is excellent, I would go beyond saying it is "acceptable" or "preferred". I would say you "must" use an apologetic tone for one very good reason: if the user is making a mistake, it is because the user does not understand the rules or logic of the system. That is not the fault of the user! It is responsibility of the system to ...
38
Just because your brand color is red doesn't make the use of red for errors obsolete, it's just a matter of extent.
Take the Viaplay signup form for example:
Viaplay has red as their main accent color, which is used throughout the website for actions buttons, icons, header, graphic elements etc.. however, in the form they do tone down the use. They ...
37
Warn them, and show a link to download Firefox, etc... here's why
IMHO, the visitors who come to your website or web application with an IE6 browser, fall into two general parties:
Members of a locked down major corporation that can't afford the time or money to update their entire organization's security settings after allowing everyone to move to IE7,8, ...
35
The book About Face 3 has some good advice. The paramount of which is to design the software to eliminate the need for error dialogs. In cases where that isn't possible, the authors recommend:
Make an error dialog polite, illuminating, and helpful. (Remember that the error message is actually the software reporting it's inability to perform, not the user's ...
33
Taking a step back: Why was this feature made available (visible) to the user in the first place?
If it is a feature not available to a specific user (or user class), hide it.
If it is a premium feature that you'd like to upsell - do so.
History export is a great way to backup your data, but is available on premium accounts only. Get in touch with ...
30
Before you completely hide a part of the UI for a feature which the user doesn't have access to, consider:
Will the user know about that feature?
Will they spend a lot of time hunting for it?
Would you be better off keeping it around in some kind of "disabled" state along with a tooltip or other indicator so that they can learn why it's not available?
...
24
Encapsulated flags are the only solution I've found that reach all edge cases. Pointing the flag at the label rather than the input allows for consistency with radio buttons and check mark groups or weird inputs like sliders or sorters.
Highlighting the field with red is also helpful, but not always possible. Example usages below.
download bmml ...
22
In general, using only color to indicate information is bad for accessibility reasons. Red/green colorblindness is the most common and occurs in 8% of males. Using an icon, like an X or warning sign, is the best way to go.
If you must differentiate color for business reasons (i.e. people at the top think it should be a different color), then pick one that ...
21
A good error message should:
Let you know what the problem is.
Make you feel like there is something that you can do about it.
Speak like a human, and be a consistent extension of the personality of the rest of the application.
For generic error messages, you can't do much about the first point, but you can do something about the other two.
Do something ...
20
Yes, error messages should apologize whenever it's remotely plausible to do so. People will ascribe human emotions to computers, so the computers should be as polite as possible, regardless of whether they're actually at fault.
A chapter "Bringing Affect to Human Computer Interaction" has a section on apologetic feedback:
Nielsen (1998) argued that ...
17
The error message should appear before the form field itself (at a minimum in the markup itself, but ideally visually shown this way on the screen too) so that when someone is reading the form they read that the field has errored before they then read the field in question - that way the user is prepared mentally that "the contents of this field I am about ...
17
I don't find apologies very humanizing from a computer, any more than an automated hold system for a phone network makes me feel like my call is important by saying, "Your call is very important to us! Please stay on the line for the next available representative."
I don't think the apologies are the main issue here. Far more important is that they are ...
15
The point of a good error page is to apologize for the error, explain what happened in layman terms, what might be responsible for this, and what next steps to take.
Yet, error 500 rarely supplies a good explanation so the error page has to be vague. This results in users starting to refresh the page hoping it would miraculously render, even in cases of ...
14
Instead of using colors, draw visual emphasis through other means, such as using danger icons, font weight, and/or jagged outlines.
Here's a an example, excessively using all three of these cues:
EDIT: The comments below suggest that I didn't make it clear enough in my original post that using all three of these cues together would be excessive. (I'd ...
13
You will always have a significant percentage of users who ignores many or all error messages. Even when they call support, have the error message in front of them and claim to have read it, they may very well still not have assimilated the content of the message. You should therefore try very hard to avoid having to put up an error dialog.
In addition to ...
13
I usually like to show an error message on top that summarizes all errors on the page, plus in each location, highlight what is wrong.
For example with a form, on top you would say that email, phone and address are required, and in the form, set all of these three fields in red with a text along the lines of "this field is required" (or something more ...
13
The basic idea with showing an error message is to let the user know that something went wrong and his actions may not have resulted in a desired way.
So, if the error is something that doesn't affect the users perception of the program - don't show it, but keep it in an error log (for example, the function took 50% longer to execute due to some errors, ...
11
Displaying an error message
Ideally you want a combination of your #1 and #2 suggestions:
Please select a date that doesn't fall on a weekend or a holiday and is at least 3 business days from now.
The reason this is the best option is because this is what you would say to a person if they were standing next to you. A good rule of thumb for error copy, or ...
11
I think red is pretty much the convention in this context so you should use red for errors that need to be fixed before you can move on/send the form. Yellow is in general for warnings (eg. user perhaps should/could improve something, but it does not stop from proceeding). Yellow can be used with for example with one of those password strength thingies where ...
11
The only place where you don't use a full stop is in titles (such as in the title bar of a window). In all other cases, you need proper punctuation.
Compare it to a book: the title of the book does not end with a period, all sentences inside do end with punctuation. Except the titles of the chapters, which are titles again.
I remember in elementary school ...
11
It seems you're already marking optional form fields instad of required ones. There seem to be no 'required' indicators, but no 'optional'-indicators, too, so I wanted to mention that.
What I like to do on forms is to "micro-gamify" them: For every field in the form provide a "validation-indicator". For simplicity, let's say it's just a small circle. This ...
11
Be natural, this can be annoying if you're apologizing too often, write your message in plain language—like a human talking to another human. If error is caused by you (your app, your server e.t.c.) add apology, otherwise leave just statement of fact and how to resolve the issue.
For example:
"Sorry, we couldn't send your message because of [some] ...
10
At my company, we neither display a warning nor a blocking message. We make the site usable in IE6, and that's enough. There's no need to wave your hands in the air and say "sorry, we don't have the time to make our site look pretty in your browser". IE6 users probably don't care about poorly rendered pages anyway since they are used to it - every other page ...
10
Defensive Design for the Web: How to Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points (2004) by 37signals, while outdated in 2011, does show you various examples of bad error handling, including copy, and explains what's wrong and how to improve. It calls all this "contingency design" (the title of the book is inspired by the concept of defensive ...
9
Depending on the application, I often just don't display the parts of the page a user doesn't have access to. It sounds like you have users changing other user's rights, so this method may not work. I would recommend displaying an error message whenever you display a disabled input element. Users can become frustrated when they are unable to perform an ...
9
Red for error messages and alerting to something that is of critical attention is pretty standard in Western society.
It is well used in operating systems, like Windows and OSX to use red for error, yellow for warning and green for success messages. This might be as subtle as just having a red “X” or a green tick, but they communicate the status of the ...
9
The address confirmation may only be valid as a confirmation one time, but that doesn't mean that you have to have no knowledge of it once it has been used. You could store confirmation links for a period of time (say a month), and if someone tries to use it again in that period of time, you would show them a page explaining that the email address (and show ...
9
I've done some quick analysis of existing applications to see what they do in such a situation.
Facebook - Red message saying 'no internet connection'
Vine - Greyscale sad smiley saying 'couldn't load posts'
Safari - Greyscale icon saying 'cannot open the page because your iPhone is not connected to the Internet
Flipboard - Empty (Grey) containers with 'No ...
8
I see two different approaches.
If the actions are disabled because of security I would actually try to remove them if at all possible. Easy with menu items or most toolbar buttons.
If the actions are disabled because you have a cheaper version of the software, I'd keep them present but disabled. This lets the user know "you could have this if you paid ...
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