Error Messages

I'm a computer person. My dad has been working in IT since I was born, and then some. So I grew up around computers in various states of disrepair. I'm still fairly low on the sliding scale of computer geeks, but I spend quite a lot of time around the things.

So it annoys me no end when I see somebody doing something wrong. A lot of the time I wouldn't even notice. But there are some very annoying, very stupid things that software developers do. One of these things is publishing software with utterly unhelpful error messages.

 These messages fall into roughly two classes, at opposite ends of the scale. The two classes are complete opposites, but both are equally heinous.

First you have the overly technical errors. I suffer from these a lot, particularly in smartphone apps. And I can actually understand messages which would be gibberish to the average person ("Could not resolve connection to host," for example). I pity people who have spent their time on social skills rather than on computers, because they must have to endure even more incomprehension than me.

Now, technical errors are fine when an app or a program is in development. They let the programmers figure out what went wrong, where it went wrong, and how to fix it. But showing a user - who is probably untrained in software design, and who definitely hasn't memorised a list of error codes for your software - the message "Error 0x23D2" is pointless - especially if the error means something like "You aren't connected to the internet," something which the user is going to need to fix themselves.

The opposite problem occurs when, in what is presumably an attempt to avoid damaging the user's brain, the developers provide as little information as possible, often wrapping their noninformation in a platitude to further protect the grey matter of the sensitive user. In other words, overly vague errors. In some ways, these are even worse than the too-technical sort. At least the latter are useful to technically skilled people or, at the very least, the software's developers. Error messages that manage to go through dozens of words without actually saying anything are universally useless

I don't like programs or apps that tell me "Could not [do thing you were trying to do]. Please try again later." The word "Error" conveys the same meaning, is far less patronising, and leaves enough space to tell me how to fix it - especially since just saying "Could not connect to internet" would save a whole lot of troubleshooting. Even worse than this is the increasingly common message along the lines of "Oops. Something went wrong. Try again later." Really? I mean, really?