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"Something went wrong"

These kinds of error messages are often a dead giveaway that a company (or product) doesn't know what it's doing. How can you know something went wrong, but not actually say what went wrong in the error message? Either 1. You don't have sufficient logging and/or error handling to know what specifically went wrong, or 2. You do know specifically what went wrong but don't know how to fix it or what to tell the user to do to fix it, or 3. You know what went wrong but are being deliberately vague with the user. None of the above are a really good look.



I've seen a lot of #3 used under the guise of either security or user friendliness.


Yeah fraud and security tend to have useless error messages (for justifiable reasons, but it's still annoying).


It's really not justifiable to have in-actionable error messages for things like fraud prevention. You don't necessarily need to say exactly why it was triggered or even that it was fraud detection, but at least give me steps to get my issue resolved. If I need to contact support, say so. If I'm locked out for 10 minutes, tell me so I don't waste my time. If I need to change settings, tell me what to do.

Getting told to "try again later" every day you try to send money through a payment app is not a useful error. (I'm not entirely sure if it's fraud protection, but I also have no idea why I couldn't send money because it won't give me any resolution steps).

People familiar with fraud protection or security may assume that the error message is related to fraud protection or security, but actual users are just going to be frustrated.




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