How to get users to read error messages?

Question

If you program for a nontechnical audience, you find yourself at a high risk that users will not read your carefully worded and enlightening error messages, but just click o

Answer 1

Adding an "Advanced" button that enables some more technical details will provide an incentive to read it for the part of the target audience that thinks itself as technical

Answer 2

How about making the button state "Click here to speak with a support technician who will assist you with this issue."

There are many websites that provide the option to speak with a real person.

Answer 3

I read a candidate for the most horrific solution on slashdot:

We have found that the only way to make users take responsibility for errors is to give them a penalty for forcing the error to go away. For starters, where possible, the error wont actually close for them unless we enter an admin password to make it go away, and if they reboot to get rid of it (Task Manager is disabled on all client PC's) the machine will not open the application that crashed for 15 minutes. Of course, this all depends on the type of users you are dealing with, as more technically adept users wouldnt accept this kind of system, but after trying for literally YEARS to make users take responsibility for crashes and making sure the IT department is aware of them in order to fix the issue before it gets too hard to manage, these are the only steps that worked. Now, all of our end users are aware that if they ignore errors, they are going to suffer for it themselves.

Answer 4

Unless you can provide the user some simple work-around, don't bother showing the user an error message at all. There is just no point, since 90% of users won't care what it says.

On the other hand If you CAN actually show the user a useful workaround, then one way to force them to read it is make the OK button become enabled after 10 seconds or so. Sort of how Firefox does it whenever you are trying to install a new plug-in.

If it is a total crash that you cannot gracefully recover from, then inform the user in very layman terms saying:

"I'm sorry we screwed up, we would like to send some information about this crash, will you allow us to do so? YES / NO"

In addition, try not to make your error messages longer than a sentence. When people (me included) see a whole paragraph talking about the error, my mind just shuts off.

With so much social media and information overload, people's mind freeze when they see a wall of text.

EDIT:

Someone once also recently suggested using comic strips along with whatever message you want to show. Such as something from Dilbert that may be close to the type of error you may have.

Answer 5

I often display the error in red (when the design allows it).

Red stands for "alert", etc. so it's more often read.

Answer 6

I'd suggest that you give feedback (stating that the user made a mistake) immediately after the mistake is made. (For instance, when entering a value of a date field, check the value and, if it is wrong, make the input field visually different).

If there are errors on the page (I'm more into web development, hence I'm referring to it as a "page", but it can be also called "form"), show an "error summary", explaining that there were errors and a bulleted list of what exactly errors happened. However, if there are more than 5-6 words per message, those won't be read/understood.