Jakob Nielsen Error Message Guidelines
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Interaction Ideation Information Architecture Interaction Design International Users Intranets Management Mobile & Tablet Navigation Non-Profit Websites Personas Persuasive Design Prototyping Psychology and UX Research Methods Search Social Media Strategy User Testing Visual Design Web Usability Writing for the Web Young Users Author Jakob Nielsen Don Norman Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini See all authors… All Authors (hide) mobile error messages Aurora Bedford Raluca Budiu Susan Farrell Therese Fessenden Kim Flaherty Sarah Gibbons Page Laubheimer Angie Li Hoa Loranger Kate Meyer Jakob Nielsen Don Norman Kara Pernice Christian Rohrer Amy Schade Katie Sherwin Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini Kathryn Whitenton Kate Williamson Recent Articles Journey Mapping in Real Life: A Survey of UX Practitioners Consistency in the Omnichannel Experience Scan and Shake: A Lesson in Technology Adoption from China’s WeChat Frequency & Recency of Site Visits: 2 Metrics for User Engagement International B2B Audiences: Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Site for Global Users See all articles… Popular Articles Usability 101: Introduction to Usability Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design How Users Read on the Web F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design 10 Best Intranets of 2016 When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods Response Times: The 3 Important Limits Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users The Fold Manifesto: Why the Page Fold Still Matters Improving the
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Intranets Mobile & Tablet User Testing Web Usability See all topics… All Article Topics All Topics (hide) 500 error message examples Accessibility Agile Analytics & Metrics Application Design B2B Websites Behavior Patterns Branding Collaboration Content Strategy Corporate Websites Design Patterns Design Process E-commerce Email Eyetracking Heuristic Evaluation Human https://www.nngroup.com/articles/improving-dreaded-404-error-message/ Computer Interaction Ideation Information Architecture Interaction Design International Users Intranets Management Mobile & Tablet Navigation Non-Profit Websites Personas Persuasive Design Prototyping Psychology and UX Research Methods Search Social Media Strategy User Testing Visual Design Web Usability Writing for the Web Young Users Author Jakob Nielsen Don Norman Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini See all authors… All Authors https://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-10-application-design-mistakes/ (hide) Aurora Bedford Raluca Budiu Susan Farrell Therese Fessenden Kim Flaherty Sarah Gibbons Page Laubheimer Angie Li Hoa Loranger Kate Meyer Jakob Nielsen Don Norman Kara Pernice Christian Rohrer Amy Schade Katie Sherwin Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini Kathryn Whitenton Kate Williamson Recent Articles Journey Mapping in Real Life: A Survey of UX Practitioners Consistency in the Omnichannel Experience Scan and Shake: A Lesson in Technology Adoption from China’s WeChat Frequency & Recency of Site Visits: 2 Metrics for User Engagement International B2B Audiences: Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Site for Global Users See all articles… Popular Articles Usability 101: Introduction to Usability Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design How Users Read on the Web F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design 10 Best Intranets of 2016 When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods Response Times: The 3 Important Limits Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users The Fold Manifesto: Why the Page Fold Still
27 28 29 30 31 http://dux.typepad.com/dux/2012/12/anatomy-of-an-error-message.html Authors Alan Ho Alex Rice-Khouri Alison Kather Allen-Hongwei Bai Ananth Uggirala Carin Rogoff Caroline Dorin Cecilia Farell Chauncey Wilson Chris Yanchar Desirée Sy Douglas Look Erin Bradner Eunice Chang Ian Hooper Jason Winstanley Joe http://www.extremetechwriting.com/2012/01/20/error-messages-and-the-technical-writer/ Lachoff John Schrag Joshua Ledwell Julie Schiller Karen Mason Karen Smith Kem-Laurin Kramer Kevin Dolley Kursat Ozenc Len Whitehead Lillian Smith Lira Nikolovska Lisa McCarty Lynn Miller Mark Jamieson Matt Stein Melissa D. Schmidt error message Peng Hong Rebecca Richkus Roxane Ouellet Ryan Arnaudin Stephen O'Connell Susan Wilhite Tom Vollaro Veronica Meuris Yan Schober « Method 22 of 100: Affinity Diagramming | Main | Sustainable User Experience in the Clouds (1 of 3) » December 19, 2012 Anatomy of an Error Message By Cecilia Farell “I’ve just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It’s going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.” form error messages Some of you might remember this line spoken by the humanlike computer, HAL 9000, in Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Despite the trademark soothing voice (listen), HAL’s message has a chilling effect. Why? Because HAL doesn’t really say anything about what’s actually wrong (what’s an AE35 unit and how is it faulting out?). Even if he did, he offers no way of preventing the failure and whatever might happen because of it. HAL of course is not unique. He “sounds” exactly like most of the applications and websites we interact with today. In the real world though, as HAL himself would put it, bad error messages are entirely attributable to human error. The “good” in good error messages Now that we’ve seen what a bad error message looks like, let’s talk about what you can do to make your error messages good. In a very early post on Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen identified five characteristics: Explicit An error message should first indicate that something is wrong. Let users know an error has occurred with an explicit and noticeable message. Precise Users also need to know what happened and where and, in some cases, why. But perhaps the most important piece of information th
very interesting discussion with an engineering manager. We were reviewing upcoming projects and trying to determine the documentation that would be required. Talking about logs and error messages, I told him that, in an ideal world, they should be self-contained and so obvious that they would not need to be documented. He smiled and said: "But then, wouldn't you be putting yourself out of work?" No. Quite the contrary, actually. Being a technical writer involves much more than writing the install, admin, and user guides that go with a product. Every user interaction provides an opportunity to help our readers work with our products. That is particularly the case with alarms, logs, and error messages, which provide information that they are generally very interested in. Messages are usually written by developers, for whom writing is often not a strength nor an interest. They are written quickly-rarely with the user in mind-and almost never indicate what users should do about the problem they've encountered. Some messages are sometimes so cryptic that we end up writing developer-language-to-plain-English translation guides, which can be very frustrating to our users: They are stuck in a bad situation and get a message that is not very instructive, so they need to open a troubleshooting guide, find the error message, read the description and required action, and then go back to the interface. Whenever possible, why not simply provide all this information directly in the alarm, message, or log? Obviously, some complex situations require a more detailed description and action plan, which cannot be provided in a few lines. But in many cases, this is a perfect opportunity to use our skills and work with development to write better messages. This can be achieved in a few ways: Through test plans: In my current mandate, we are using a test plan to document the error messages. For each test case, a column is added to the spreadsheet to specify the message that should be displayed in this situation. The developer uses this to code the text message. By attending development meetings: These meetings provide the perfect opportunity for us to be a user advocate. In a recent meeting, while discussing a particularly problematic situation, the product manager suggested to the developer that he should provide a detailed error message to the user. I'm pretty sure that I saw panic in the developer's eyes for a brief moment, quickly replaced by relief when I volunteered to write the message. :) By editing the error messages directly: In many cases, the e