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

Depending on your user base, writing funny/rude/personal error messages can work great.

For instance, I wrote an application which allowed our HR people to better track the hire/fire dates of employees. [we were a small company, very laid back].

When they entered wrong dates I would write:

Hey dumb ass, learn how to enter a date!

EDIT: Of course a more helpful message is to say: "Please enter date as mm/dd/yyyy" or perhaps in code to try and figure out what they entered and if they entered "blahblah" to show an error. However, this was a very small application for an HR person I knew personally. Hence again people, read the first line of this post: Depending on your user base...

I recently worked on an Art Institute project, so the error messages were geared towards the audience, such as:

Most art before the Baroque period was unsigned. However, we’re beyond the Baroque period now, so all fields must be completed.

Basically gear it to your audience if at all possible, and avoid boring as all unearthly general errors such as: "please enter email" or "please enter valid email".

Answer 2

Less errors

If an application throws vomit at you on a regular basis, you become immune to it, and errors become irritating background muzak. If an error is a rare event, it will garner more attention.

Quosh anything which isn't a major deal, throw out all those warnings, find ways of understanding user intent, take out the decisions wherever possible. I have a few apps which I continue to streamline in this way. Developers see every error as important, but this is not true from a user perspective. Look for the users' common response to a problem and capture that, deploy that as your response.

If you do need to raise an error: short, concise, low terror factor, no exclamation marks. Paragraphs are fail.

There's no silver bullet, but you need to socially engineer to make errors important.

Answer 3

We put a simple memorable graphic in the error box: not an icon, a fairly large bitmap, and nothing like the standard Windows message icons. Nobody can ever remember the wording of a messagebox (most won't even read it if the box has an "OK" button they can press), but most people DO remember the picture they saw. So our support people can ask the customer "did you see the coffee-drinking guy?" or "did you see the empty desk?". At least that way we know roughly what went wrong.

Answer 4

Make them fun. (It seemed relevant, given the site we're on :) )

Answer 5

Show them the message. Due dilligence and all, but log every error to a file. Users can't remember what they were doing or what the error message was seconds after the event, it's like eye-witness accounts of perpatrators.

Provide a good way to allow them to email or upload the log to you so that you can assist them in reconciling the issue. If it's a web application: even better, you can be receiving information about the situation ahead of anyone even reporting the problem.

Answer 6

One thing I'd like to add.

Use verbs for your action buttons to close your error messages rather than exclamations, example don't use "Ok!" "Close" etc.