Bad things happen

09Apr08

I was working in a CMS yesterday, using a browser, and I got this error message:

I am not sure what I think of it. At first I thought it was pretty silly, it seemed to be treating me like an idiot, talking down to me like some techies and Helpdeskers have in the past. It seemed to epitomise that attitude that accuses users when things go wrong with machines: “what did YOU DO to IT?” Once you’ve worked around computers for long enough you will know that sometimes there seems to be no obvious answer for errors, otherwise there would be no need for the millions of troubleshooting forums on the web. Taking out your frustration on a user is not really going to solve the problem and is one reason why many novices are cautious and scared around computers, often feeling they are going to break them. (Not without an axe is always my answer).

Another reason it annoyed was the fact that I didn’t know what I had done to cause the error. The screen was indicating that my cursor had selected only one line of a bullet-list. As far as I could tell, there was no error.

Perhaps what irked me most was the anthropomorphic nature of the message, a style that is outdated and pretty geeky. Things like Flickr don’t have the ‘page’ talk to me, they just give me a gentle prod in the right direction. This message seemed not only overly geeky and condescending while trying to be human and cool, it didn’t give me any more knowledge about what had happened and how I could stop it in the future, especially since the selected text on my screen backed up what I thought I did.

And then again, maybe I spend way too long thinking about error messages. Yes. Life, get one. Ahem.

PS Flickr now does video. Well, I’m excited.

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Tags: cms, errors, flickr, ux