Best Practices Failed Login Error Messages
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Error Message Text Best Practices
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Login Error Message Examples
Anybody can answer The best answers are voted up and rise to the top Why is the common practice of sign in error message always mix the wrong username/password cases together? up vote 14 down vote favorite 1 Example: When I try to sign in a service with a Username / Password combination, the error message always returns as "Username or password is invalid." login error message best practices But the actual case is that I input a wrong username which doesn't even exist on this site. Why doesn't the message simply tell me the username doesn't exist? I tried with several services. Only Facebook tells me my account doesn't exist. Others (Google, Twitter, SlideShare, Yahoo!) just don't rule out the possibility that password is wrong. I am wondering why this is a common practice. Is it some tradition dated back from old-time limitation which has great potential to improve, or does it behave like this for some legal reason? login share|improve this question asked Jun 29 '10 at 2:59 0065paula 7113 2 Security trumps apparent user-friendliness. The ultimate in user un-friendliness is having your account hacked... –Alex Feinman Jun 7 '11 at 13:04 add a comment| 6 Answers 6 active oldest votes up vote 42 down vote It makes sense in terms of protecting the privacy of the users, because the feedback (error message) doesn't categorically inform the potentially malicious person or bot that "you found the right username, now all you have to guess/crack is the password" share|improve this answer answered Jun 29 '10 at 3:42 Allan Caeg
Experience View 21 comments Outline In order to display error messages on forms, you need to consider the following four basic rules: The error message needs to be short and meaningful The placement of
Password Error Messages Examples
the message needs to be associated with the field The message style needs to
Examples Of Good Error Messages
be separated from the style of the field labels and instructions The style of the error field needs to be different form error messages design than the normal field By combining these four rules, it is possible to provide the necessary information to users where they have made mistakes on filling in forms and how to rectify them quickly http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/5291/why-is-the-common-practice-of-sign-in-error-message-always-mix-the-wrong-usernam and easily. This will encourage and help users to continue with their journey on the site; reduce basket abandonment; increase site registrations; increase enquiries about an application form and so forth. Introduction A typical interaction with many websites is filling in forms. For example, if you are buying something online, you have to give your card details, delivery address and other personal information. By clever placement of labels, instructions http://www.nomensa.com/blog/2010/4-rules-displaying-error-messages-user-experience-perspective to fill in a field and additional design elements can make a form less daunting and may result in fewer mistakes made (Jarrett, C. and Gaffney, G., 2008). However, I have seen that users make the same mistakes on forms again and again as these websites show error messages which are either not very clear to the user or because of their placement; users are unclear what messages relate to. This article focuses on how to provide error messages on forms from a user experience perspective. The message The error message needs to be clear, precise, short and punchy. Users should be able to immediately understand what ‘mistakes they have made’ and how to recover the error. This is fundamental and will have a huge impact if users can’t immediately understand what mistake they have made. One example of an unclear error message is on the Hotmail registration page where it asks for user’s ‘Birth year’. I remember using only two digits to represent a year before the year 2000. Well, the form does not give any instruction on that; even the error message does not give a clear idea of what was wrong with entering two digits for my birth year. Figure 1: Hotmail
here for a quick overview of the site Help Center Detailed answers to any questions you might have Meta http://stackoverflow.com/questions/117083/error-message-text-best-practices Discuss the workings and policies of this site About Us Learn more about Stack Overflow the company Business Learn more about hiring developers or posting ads with us Stack Overflow Questions Jobs Documentation Tags Users Badges Ask Question x Dismiss Join the Stack Overflow Community Stack Overflow is a community of 4.7 million programmers, just like you, error message helping each other. Join them; it only takes a minute: Sign up Error Message Text - Best Practices up vote 12 down vote favorite 3 We are changing some of the text for our old, badly written error messages. What are some resources for best practices on writing good error messages (specifically for Windows XP/Vista). user-interface error-handling login error message usability share|improve this question asked Sep 22 '08 at 19:46 NotDan 13.4k2793146 It would be nice to detail who your audience is: end users ? developers ? –rlerallut Sep 22 '08 at 20:53 add a comment| 12 Answers 12 active oldest votes up vote 6 down vote accepted In terms of wording your error messages, I recommend referring to the following style guides for Windows applications: Windows user experience guidelines, and specifically the section on error messages here. Microsoft Manual of Style share|improve this answer edited May 29 '14 at 23:27 answered Sep 22 '08 at 20:17 ChrisN 12.4k84171 add a comment| up vote 5 down vote The ultimate best practice is to prevent the user from causing errors in the first place. Don't tell users anything they don't care about; error code 5064 doesn't mean a thing to anyone. Don't tell them they did something wrong; disallow it in the first place. Don't blame them, especially not for mistakes your software made. Above all, when there