I’ve lamented here before, but the number of technical people who absolutely freeze up at the sight of an error message is daunting. Being able to interpret errors correctly is a huge step up in this industry; to me it feels like table stakes, but clearly isn’t.
> I’ve lamented here before, but the number of technical people who absolutely freeze up at the sight of an error message is daunting.
"freeze" is still a much better reaction than "quickly dismiss without paying attention". I can understand "freeze"; it's possible to learn and train from there to "good, well done, now read everything and think". I do not understand "quickly dismiss without reading and paying attention".
(I know about the studies for "people dismiss something that isn't getting them their goal", but I still don't understand the mindset that can dismiss something like that even when theoretically trying to figure something out.)
Part of the problem is that we've trained everyone, especially nontechnical people, to ignore and dismiss stuff.
You're using a program. A thingy pops up or unexpectedly shows up that interrupts you.
80% chance it's some stupid ad or newsletter thing. Dismiss with prejudice.
19% chance it's a "oopsie poopsie we did and whoopsie, the server monkeys are working VERY HARD to fix this, sowwy!!" and then the app still works apparently just fine, or if it doesn't you just force close and re-open the app.
1% of the time it's an ad again.
In the remaining floating point error's worth of %, it's an actual actionable thing a user could action to fix the issue.
I don't really blame people for just predicting that a pop up will be useless because it probably will be.
Usually error messages are somewhat nice, What I have problems with at work is "error 395" and such. Where the documentation for the error codes can't be found easily.
Or a junior dev will see "Error 422: thing_id is required" and instead of updating the request they sent to include thing_id they'll report it as if it's a 500 Internal Server Error until you pick up the ticket and read the error message to them.
Of course, they didn't actually put the error message in the ticket, they'll write "backend crashed" and put a screenshot of the front-end crashing because they didn't do any error handling at all.
Or its close cousin: "Yay, now we have a different error message!" When something is totally broken and you have no idea why, this is a promising signpost.
