Generic Form Error Message
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Generic Error Message
the company Business Learn more about hiring developers or posting ads with us User Experience Questions Tags Users friendly error messages examples Badges Unanswered Ask Question _ User Experience Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for user experience researchers and experts. Join them; it only takes a minute: Sign up generic error meaning Here's how it works: Anybody can ask a question Anybody can answer The best answers are voted up and rise to the top What is the recommended wording for a generic error message up vote 36 down vote favorite 19 What would be the best wording for a generic error message? With generic error message I mean a message for
Error Message Examples Text
an error that has occured but there are no details on what the error is or how to recover from it. It will be used exclusively as a fallback solution when it is not possible to determine the error either because the server did not sent any additional details or there is a "probable" timeout... and other similar edge cases. It should be aimed to minimize the amount of frustration/anger. I've read a few threads but none of them seems to be 100% relevant Recommendations for good resources on writing good error messages Standardized (web) application error messages? [closed] This is actually a very close match but error reports are out of scope in my case What will be the Best notifications and error messages? Error Message Advice (for asynchronous/background tasks) Generic/vague error messages to pass to spammy users? copywriting error-message wording share|improve this question edited May 4 '13 at 13:32 JohnGB♦ 57.7k19154265 asked May 3 '13 at 15:11 Toni Toni Chopper 8821718 An unexpected error occurred... –Justin Meiners May 4 '13 at 0:07 add a co
· See all 186 articles based on findings from our e-commerce usability research Subscribe by E-Mail or RSS Improve Validation Errors with Adaptive Messages Jamie Appleseed · February 10, 2015 This is pretty much as bad as it gets. The user good error message text is just told their input is invalid with no hints as to why that is generic failure error message or how they can fix it. Form validation errors are inevitable. Yes, they can (and should) be minimized, but validation errors won’t
Standard Error Message Text Examples
ever be eliminated – they are a natural part of complex forms and user’s data input. The key question then is how to make it easy for the user to recover from form errors. In this http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/39101/what-is-the-recommended-wording-for-a-generic-error-message article we’ll go over findings from our usability studies on how the wording of validation error messages largely determines the user’s error recovery experience, and how “Adaptive Error Messages” have shown to significantly reduce the user’s error recovery time. Common fields that we frequently observe to cause cause validation issues during testing include: phone number (formatting), state text field (‘TX’ vs. ‘Texas’), dates (month names or digits), monetary amounts (decimal separator, thousand http://baymard.com/blog/adaptive-validation-error-messages separators, currency, etc) credit card number (are spaces allowed?), and address (street number in address line 1 or 2?). Generic Error Messages When benchmarking the checkout process of 100 major e-commerce sites, we found that most form validation error messages are woefully generic. This is problematic because it doesn’t do much in way of helping the user understand what the error is and how to fix it. Generic error messages tend to run the spectrum from unhelpful to completely useless. For instance, during benchmarking we saw the ‘Phone’ field yield error messages such as: “Invalid” “Not a valid US phone number” “Not a valid 10-digit US phone number (must not include spaces or special characters)” The first error message is obviously the worst as it offers zero help as to why the input isn’t accepted – it just states that the site doesn’t consider it “valid”. The second error message is still pretty bad, in that it just says the input isn’t a “valid US phone number” but it doesn’t hint at why that might be. The third error message is better than the others because it not only states that it must be a US phone number but also indicates that a country code, spaces, or other formatting, will cause the validation to fail
and to http://spring.io/questions for a curated list of stackoverflow tags that Pivotal engineers, and the community, monitor. Announcement Announcement Module Collapse No announcement yet. Generic http://forum.spring.io/forum/spring-projects/web/78902-generic-error-messages error messages Page Title Module Move Remove Collapse X Conversation Detail http://www.uacolumn.com/generic_errors/ Module Collapse Posts Latest Activity Search Forums Page of 1 Filter Time All Time Today Last Week Last Month Show All Discussions only Photos only Videos only Links only Polls only Filtered by: Clear All new posts justin_t Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2010 Posts: 14 #1 Generic error message error messages Mar 19th, 2010, 10:37 PM Hi, I am using spring 3.0.1 and am trying to figureout how to bind generic error message instead of having to bind to a form field. The situation is that, we have a form which when submitted would result in a call to another application. If the other application returns an error message, good error message we need to display that message on top of the page since the error is not specific to any form field. Any advise? Tags: None justin_t Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2010 Posts: 14 #2 Mar 21st, 2010, 07:58 AM Up Up!!! Thoughts -any one? Comment Cancel Post F.Degenaar Senior Member Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 288 #3 Mar 22nd, 2010, 05:16 AM http://forum.springsource.org/showth...error+messages HTH Comment Cancel Post justin_t Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2010 Posts: 14 #4 Mar 22nd, 2010, 10:50 AM Does not work Thank you for the reply .. I have tried that solution and it did not work. I kept getting binding errors on the page. Based on the code from richard, I added a new Object error with key as command object replacing member in the example below with my own object. Code: errors.addError(new ObjectError("member", "Invalid login details, please check and try again")); Comment Cancel Post Team Services Tools © Pivotal Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use and Privacy Subscribe to our newsletter Working... Yes No OK OK Cancel X
requires me to understand things like: What action is being performed. What caused the error. What action the user should take next. Armed with this information I can produce an error that informs the user of exactly: What went wrong Why it went wrong How to correct the problem The example above is a good example of a bad error message. It tells you nothing apart from what you already know. A good error message should be like a mini version of some API documentation. I adopt a strategy of having a title focusing on the product area (e.g. a licensed product, major functionality area) followed by a sub heading of the process being performed at the time of the error. Finally comes the error text and any corrective action. Things get a little more difficult with generic error messages. Today I had a scenario pitched to me where we required a catch all message for scenarios we had no control over. My initial reaction was to push back and demand for a specific set of more specific errors. The users would thank us for this. That's OK so long as we know what has caused the error. What happens if you don’t. Say the cleaner has knocked their vacuum cleaner into the application server’s plug socket. Maybe the System Administrator installed a patch which has affected communication between the parts of the application’s infrastructure. In such scenarios, your application, or the end user’s machine isn’t going to know about that, but the process they are performing will fail. Yuk! What then? Does this example work? On one level, yes it does. It is technically accurate. It not only states that an error has occurred, but states it that it doesn't know why. It could be worded better mind. For example, by "unknown" is it that the error is unknown. The only thing missing is what the user should do. It goes against my better judgment, but I came up with, "An error has occurred. Try again, but if the issue persists, contact your System Administrator." My logic was that if there is an issue locally at their end, they should be able to find it. If the problem is elsewhere, the System Administrator would contact our Support Desk. Share with:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window) Related Tags:Er