Displaying friendly error messages

Question

I'm curious if anyone has given some thought to the wording in desktop application error messages. As a developer I always put on my programmer hat and display it in a dialect that looks like a robot is speaking to the user.

For example:

• Failed to open file ___
• Unable to retrieve settings file
• Error occurred updating the database
• Cannot set ____
• Unknown error occured

None of these say "friendly application". Does anyone know any resources or ways of phrasing errors in less robotic language - for common errors like IO problems, database issues, null reference and so on.

Answer 1

There's quite an extensive article on error messages in the Windows Desktop Design guide.

Answer 2

Apple have something to say about writing good alert messages in their human interface guidelines.

• be brief and specific
• tell us what we can do about the problem
• don't be oblique, tell us it's gone wrong if it has
• avoid making the error feel like it's our fault

Answer 3

The messages you've posted as an example are more meant more for developers than end users.

One thing I find annoying about any kind of errors that are thrown at me as a user is when I don't have a clue why it happened. That's why such error messages should contain some information about the issue for non-programmers to understand. Like if opening a file failed, one could check whether file exists, if the permissions are OK or the path given is on a network.

There's also a great blog post by Jeff Atwood about funny error messages.

Answer 4

Not a lot of info here, but some links that you should know:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2004/01/28/64255.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229056.aspx

In general, it is good to word things so that it is clear

• what is the cause of the problem
• what can be done to fix/remedy it

My opinion: I think the most common 'bad' thing in error is to forget the second bullet. The second most common error is to provide insufficient info for the first bullet (e.g. 'file not found' - which file?!?)