Way back when during my days at Microsoft, I worked on an OS project that
had the goal of eliminating all error messages in much the way you
suggested.
We found that in simple, webish, apps, this was easier to manage than say,
Excel or Word. In complex apps the amount of data entry or scripting like
functionality made it prohibitively expensive to handle all the error cases
well (or to eliminate the many gratutious error messages). Flickr is a great
example - there's a tiny amount of user data entry, and flickr does very
little with it - it's all meta data. Try to do the same with Quickbooks,
Filemaker, or even an E-mail program and it's much harder to pull off given
the # of non-trivial error cases. Not impossible, but more dev work
intensive than you'd think.
Error messages are popular simply because they are the cheapest interaction
a programmer has - it's much less work to handle users with errors than it
is to write code that gracefully resolves issues on its own.
So like in many cases, the question isn't as much about what the superior
design is, it's finding a way to make that superior design affordable to
build.
-Scott
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Saffer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "IxDA Discuss" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 7:23 AM
Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Error Messages (Was: Hiding and Disabling Menu
Items)
In fact, based on this conversation, I'm going to toss out one other
possible best practice:
The system should never present an error message to a user unless the
user has done everything right but the system itself cannot respond
correctly. Users should otherwise never be allowed to make "errors."
(Flickr, for instance, does this very well.)
Dan
________________________________________________________________
Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe
List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines
List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
________________________________________________________________
Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe
List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines
List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
