201–210 of 262 posts
Given the reference to "your administrator" the user-facing sorry seems fine. IMNSHO, dev-facing error messages bifurcate: - errors for unsuitable input should not be apologetic: "inconsistent def'ns at foo:42 and bar:69" - errors for implementation limitations may be apologetic: "sorry, at foo:42 node bar has 69 attributes; this implementation supports at most 63"
I'm administrator! :'-(
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Reminds me of the panicked woman who hit F12 while on FB, saw the log message "forcing children into a div", and concluded she had discovered evidence of child abuse. I believe this was before FB printed the big ASCII art "STOP!" message to console.
Back when we first got a computer, my mother was highly concerned by the Windows 9x error message "Your computer has performed an illegal operation and must shut down"
Then again, that was nearly 30 years ago. Maybe we didn't have as many studies on users back then.
I don't even like "We" in UI messages. "We couldn't find that site." "We're just updating your computer." Perhaps I'm just an old fogey, but passive voice feels like the only right choice: "The site could not be found." "Your computer is being updated." The insertion of "We" feels like an imposition; the company who wrote the code reaching in and enacting their will with your equipment, using your screen as their soa…
I like the idea of haiku error messages (as in Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett's Good Omens). "Site not found" becomes, with some LLM assistance: Amidst cyberspace vast, Site elusive, lost in void, Unreachable code.
(I could swear that one of these appeared in BeOS' NetPositive browser if you visited a site without network access... but now I'm not so sure.)
Edit: now I'm sure: https://8325.org/haiku/
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But that was just brutal honesty: it's not your computer anymore.
I've never liked the "my" prefix for labels because it wasn't immediately obvious whether "my" referred to me , or to the person/company/entity/software which created the thing. This is particularly annoying when error messages are written from the point of view of an entity or fictitious person, e.g. "Sorry, I wasn't able to..." but things on screen are labeled "My..." Is "me" the user or the software?
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I blame Google for popularizing that. Honestly it was fine enough for a YouTube error, "we couldn't find that video." But then everyone started copying it, including Microsoft who, in Windows 8, updated the blue screen of death to have a "whoopsie poopsie! Your computer has a widdle boo boo!" type message, accented with a :( sad face emoticon. Which I can guarantee was presented to countless people who lost real work…
As an aside we once set a labmates' welcome screen to the blue screen of death. We let him angrily restart the laptop 3 times before letting on. This predated the annoying :( which I think would have led him to break the computer after the second try
Back then the I-cannot-program-my-VCR crowd used to call tech support and scream about all the "egghead nonsense gobbledygook" on their screen. And since there's orders of magnitude more of them than there are people ready to fire up their kernel debugger and make use of that info, guess which tack the UX took?
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I've seen this one from Google which is kind of peculiar. Your client does not have permission to get URL / from this server. _That’s all we know._
Yeah, that one was always a bit weird because it's essentially a lie: no, you know more. You're not telling me and that's fine, but come on.
But yeah, it also feels like "we (Google) don't care that much about your problem here, because nobody is going to improve this software to give you a more meaningful explanation".
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Out of interest what places are those?
I haven't been there myself, but I've heard that this style of communication is very common in Japan.
Where, "That is very difficult," really means in English, "Yeah, no."
I don't even like "We" in UI messages. "We couldn't find that site." "We're just updating your computer." Perhaps I'm just an old fogey, but passive voice feels like the only right choice: "The site could not be found." "Your computer is being updated." The insertion of "We" feels like an imposition; the company who wrote the code reaching in and enacting their will with your equipment, using your screen as their soa…
It gets even worse when error messages try to be cute or clever. It's childish and slightly patronizing. "Whoops, sorry! This wasn't what you were looking for!" "Oops! You broke the internet. We are trying to fix it." "Are you lost? Let us help you home (link to home page)" https://www.callbruno.com/en/404 Just treat me like an adult and tell me what's wrong. Preferably with a googleable error code.
The worst offender I have found is Lemonade Insurance which doesn’t even tack on the obligatory “bug fixes and performance improvements” at the end.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lemonade-insurance/id105565364...
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> gerund: a form that is derived from a verb but that functions as a noun, in English ending in -ing, e.g., asking in do you mind my asking you?.
"Updating" in the phrase "Software updating" as a status message isn't a gerund though. It looks a lot like a gerund but it's really a casual form that drops the rest of the verb "[is] updating".