

Unique Error Phrases - mef
http://asana.com/2011/09/6-sad-squid-snuggle-softly/

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blahedo
There's some nice synergy between this idea and the now-famous xkcd about
passwords from a few weeks ago:

    
    
       http://www.xkcd.com/936/
    

The information-theoretic idea of encoding bits as words leverages the things
that humans are just cognitively better at. When a transmission medium is
likely to involve a human brain at some point in the trip, it behooves us to
remember that brains are not always good at the same things computers are....

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beagledude
seems like overengineering. Keep an index based on the user id with a sequence
of date incidents and show the user a list of incidents with page location
context.

Having the user remember a date seems more reasonable than some phrase they
have to copy and paste from somewhere.

Would the user rather see this list: Crash Incidents:

Section: Dashboard, Date: 08-20-2011 5:30amPST, Count: 2

Section: Report Page 1, Date: 08-22-2011 9:30amPST, Count: 1

or Crash Incidents:

12 old crickets buzz happily

9 young monkeys smoke slowly

Asana makes weird decisions sometimes.

~~~
blahedo
Seriously? I think the latter is a lot less scary in a lot of ways, and it
contains a very specific identifier even if multiple things were happening at
once. It also has built-in error correction in case the user reporting the
error mis-reads one digit or something that "isn't important". And time zones
in the identifier are just begging for misconfiguration problems.

Don't forget that the error phrase is not seen in a total vacuum. It is
prepended with the sentence "If you contact us about this error, here is your
unique error phrase", which even un-savvy users will recognise as a password
(in the children's "what's the password?" sense), that they need to remember
exactly and that doesn't itself directly carry information.

On the other hand, if you print out the date/time as part of the error
message, the user is just going to glance at it, say, yup that's the current
time, and then totally fail to record it (because there's no new information
there, right?) or even worse, try to remember it and end up guessing at the
time or even the date, making it almost worse than nothing.

~~~
beagledude
you don't report anything to the user other than you're issue has been logged,
when cust service looks up the user account they'll be able to pick out
incidents themselves and verify with the user.

"Hello Bob, I see you have 4 incidents today that we've logged, are you
calling about the issue with the Dashboard page?"

~~~
eli
Hmm, I hope none of your users ever have login issues.

~~~
beagledude
thanks!

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cedsav
I like the idea, but I would expect to see a lot of very confused users when
that error message is displayed.

Any feedback on that from your users?

~~~
lallysingh
I'm afraid that the user, expecting something (from bad error reporting in
other places) like "Resource 0x23498382 failed to close", will interpret the
error message as a further malfunction.

However, it does remind me of something pgp did, where a bit string (a key
hash, I think) was converted into a sequence of words pulled out of a
phonetically-distinct dictionary.

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smackfu
They should have expanded on this: "In most other applications, a customer-
facing ID is usually a long jumble of numbers and/or letters. There are lots
of small, subtle drawbacks to representing a number to a human this way."

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TrevorBurnham
Love it. Someone please write a Node.js library for generating these.

~~~
yesbabyyes
Here you go - I called it Greg, after mr Slovacek.

<https://github.com/linus/greg>

    
    
      npm install greg
    

Disclaimer: I wrote this in a fit of insomnia, so it's probably buggy and
there are too few words. Pull requests are welcome!

~~~
TrevorBurnham
Excellent! Thanks.

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shaggyfrog
"12 old crickets buzz happily"

Are they happy because they made the program crash?

~~~
shaggyfrog
Apparently there are at least two neg voters who think that showing an error
message that something is "happy" when the app crashes to John Q. User is a
good idea.

~~~
pjscott
Asana breaks so frequently that their users will not be particularly
frightened even if they changed their error messages to dirty limericks and
communist propaganda.

It's pretty good about not losing data, so the several-times-a-day crashes are
more of an annoyance than anything else, and their UI is the nicest I've used,
but they still need to work on being more stable than Windows 95.

~~~
zbyszek
I wasn't so keen on the idea until you mentioned "dirty limericks and
communist propaganda". I could be mollified after a crash if I read "This
software refuses to comply with the oppression of the proletariat by the boss
classes. Bug reports are bourgeois revisionism! Revolution is the only
solution! There was a young fellow from Buckingham..."

