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graemepyesterday at 6:16 PM1 replyview on HN

Most users tend to ignore diagnostic information.

"What did the error message say"

"I don't know."


Replies

Telaneoyesterday at 7:11 PM

This is because error messages have historically been bad, unintelligible, un-actionable, and hard to separate from soft errors that don't actually matter.

'Segmentation fault. Core dumped.'

'Non-fatal error detected. Contact support.'

'An error occurred.'

'An illegal operation was performed.'

'Error 92: Insufficient marmalade.'

'Saving this image as a JPG will not preserve the transparency used in the image. Save anyway?'

'Saving as .docx is not recommended because blah-blah-blah never gonna give you up nor let you down.'

I can't blame any normal user from either not understanding nor giving a shit about any of these. If we'd given users actionable information from day 1, we'd be in a very different world. Even just 'Error 852: Couldn't reach the network. Check your connection to the internet.' does help those who haven't turned of their brains entirely yet.

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