Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

If people say either of those the problem is with your product UX design in the first place.

There should be distinct progress indication for long operations and human-readable feedback for every failure mode, even if simplified, to avoid overwhelming users with difficult terminology.




Very often the simplified human-readable feedback is "Oops, that didn't work". And it is so simplified that there is no useful information to send to an expert for help. It is better when the error message is unique and can be googled (or your intranet equivalent)


I agree, this is not simplified, it is oversimplified and not a good practice.


It is perfectly fine to have "Oops it did not work, try again later".

Loads of error scenarios come up once in blue moon, details for those you should have in application logs that should be analyzed by technical support. Usually user cannot do much about those, like some service is down. Information about some specific service not working for users means your application is down, so it does not matter.

Then you have failure modes that happen often, like users getting data from outside system where your business rules do not allow for that data. In that case user has to be provided with information what he can fix, "Operation is not permitted because we operate only on yellow cars, buy a yellow car please".

In the end technical support should triage issues and invest time on specifying error messages that can help users skip technical support. It is a waste of time to come up with all errors explaining some details.


Personally I found no situations where oversimplified indication of failure is fine in such contexts.

If service is down users should know it is down and it is not a failure of their device or network connection. It is normal to skip specifics that developer need for debugging but simply indicating a failure will just annoy users because they won't know what they could do. And contacting support each and every time is tiring and counterproductive for everyone involved.

It can be error code or somewhat generalized textual description but it gives users feeling of control which most people like to have.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: