Today's peeve

[ciphergoth]

Todays peeve is idiots who say "I got an error message" but are incapable of even attempting to read the message. Did it cross your mind that the text in that message might be for something, and you might learn something by reading it? If I don't know the error, how can I fix your problem? Or are all error messages just computerese for "SOMETHING FUCKED UP, MAKE SOMEONE ELSE FIX YOUR PROBLEM"?

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Comments

[pavlos.livejournal.com]

I'll side with the users on this one. The great majority of error messages (and indeed other messages) emmited by user interfaces are impressively useless. Like:

- (program suddenly disappears with no message)
- (program fails to start with no message)
- Segmentation fault
- The memory could not be "read"
- Illegal instruction
- Could not find FOO.DLL in ...
- The network is unreachable
- Drive E is not ready
- There has been a sharing violation
- Could not log on to server

There is really no excuse for any of these. Essentially the messages are saying: Something fucked up and we haven't even bothered to give you enough details for telephone/email help, so get someone technical over here and to your problem. Utter crap. I don't blame the users for not memorising them.

But then the following messages/interactions are not much better:

- Would you like to auto-archive your old messages?
- Would you like the browser to remember this password?
- Track changes to document on/off
- Whould you like to change the document from format X-N to format X?
- Make files available offline
- Synchronize mail messages

These interactions make some attempt at being meaningful, but there's really no chance for the first-time user to make an informed choice, or to understand the implications of something like "remember password". So yeah, users are dumb, or rather unwilling to debug the technology. But then the technology makes a superficial promise at being mature and then isn't. It's the software makers who need the kicking.

(OK it could be the users who need the kicking if there's a really great maker of user-friendly, solid software that doesn't give lousy interactions but users fail to take it up and go for McSoft instead, so the market kills the good software. But it's not that that you're peeved with the uers about, is it?)

Pavlos

[nickys.livejournal.com]

Yes, the messages are not particularly helpful most of the time. If I, a professional technical writer with a BSc in electronics, can't understand them then they must be utterly incomprehensible to the average user.

There's also the fact that most times when an error occurs you can sort it out with a shutdown and restart, without bothering technical support, and you don't know until after you've tried to restart and it hasn't worked that the error message was actually important on that particular occasion...

[selectnone.livejournal.com]

- Make files available offline

I'm still not entirely sure what that means...