I'm working on a website in ASP.NET that loads the page, before doing an ajax call through javascript to get the actual data from the database (and show it inside a table most of the time). However, if something goes wrong with the ajax call, or there is an error adding/updating data, how should I notify the user about it?
- The easiest solution is of course to just show an alert, but I'm not sure if that's good user experience. Also in most browsers users can disable popup windows from a certain website, so if they do that they get 0 feedback at all when something goes wrong.
- Using a modal to get a more advanced alert.
- A separate page to display the error.
- ... Any other suggestions?
Giving the user feedback when an action failed upon submitting a form is pretty obvious. But if your website automatically updates the data by using ajax calls every x amount of time and it fails, should I notify the user too, or should I let it fail silently (considering the website is already there, they probably wouldn't notice)?
Thanks in advance!