Which principle is violated if only one error message is shown at a time?

Question

Our application is showing one error message at a time only, instead of listing all errors at once. The user spends much time clicking the OK button, fixing one item and then repeat.

Highlighting all the fields like in web applications is not possible in our application, so I expect at least a complete list of mistakes made in a message box or something.

I am aware of the issue and I'll report it, but I'd like to give the problem the correct name. If there's a UI design principle considering this issue, what's the name of it?

Answer 1

Two heuristics come to mind.

This rule from Jakob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/

"Visibility of system status - The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time."

Not having the full set of errors requires the user to guess at how many errors are left. In most cases it is helpful to provide error messages as close to when the user entered the invalid data as possible, so that they can correct it quickly.

Also, your users should be able to achieve their goals efficiently. When you are editing a form your primary goal is to save the information you have entered. If you need to click save each time to see the next error message this makes saving very inefficient. Luke Wroblewski http://www.lukew.com/ has a great book and presentation on form design best practices.

Answer 2

I did some more research and found the following (not repeating items of the answer given by @Jeremy Franck).

Principle of least astonishment [Wikipedia]

The user gets an error message and corrects the mistakes. After submitting again, he gets an error message again, for something totally unrelated which was never mentioned before.

IMHO the user will be astonished, thus violating the principle.

Principle of clarity [Bokardo]

This might not be a UX principle, but a communication principle. Anyway, an error message is a form of communication. I didn't find an original author, but it's mentioned several times in the web (e.g. here). On the Bokardo website it says:

predict what will happen when they use it, and then successfully interact with it

On the Invision website it's mentioned:

What will happen when you do it

This is not the case with several error messages. One would predict that after fixing the listed mistake, the data is accepted, but that's not the case.

Answer 3

It might violate the principle of sufficient information.

Many pieces of software still aren't particularly well-written, and they get confused easily. So they can emit a dozen or more "errors" where every one but the first is an artifact of that first one, and therefore spurious. But to an experienced person, seeing those "errors" can be helpful in debugging.

On the other hand, if these are errors shown to the naïve end-user, there can be a legitimate reason for only showing one at a time. If only the first one is real, and that one is corrected, then none of the others should ever be shown because they're not genuine errors (except in the sense that the software should be better at resisting becoming confused).