why do error messages go like “install failure error 0001” instead of telling the user what’s wrong

Question

why do error messages go like “install failure error 0001” instead of telling the user what’s wrong

In: 1812

Answer 1

I have a UX answer. All of these developer answers are correct, minus a few minor details.

For example, a good error message does exactly what you suggest. It needs to–in plain language–say what’s wrong AND how to fix it.

The error code (0001) simply helps with diagnostics when troubleshooting and narrows down an error to a general theme. (Ie; Disk, DLL, etc).

Where errors get off the rails and become useless is that people in development environments might understand the technical jargon, OR, they assume the technical details matter to people “like them”, however, the majority of users aren’t technically inclined at all. That means technical professionals write messages that make sense to *themselves* since they are usually the ones programming the messages.

However, the “correct” way to write an error message is this: <What’s wrong><Why it happened.><What to do to fix it.>

So, this could be: “Installation failed: disk space full. Clear space on the drive and try again”.

In the event that we “don’t know what’s wrong”, then it could be “An Unexpected error occurred. Please try again. If the problem persists, contact support/the manual/etc.” Then there’s some details underneath an accordion, where you get “Error 738292-20472”. That second part is for when you finish doing the recommendation from part 1. The **important** aspect is that something went wrong and we aren’t sure what. The extra information (738292-20472) is only valuable if I’m looking for it, not glancing at it. So it can either be tucked away out of sight (but reachable) or reduced in visual hierarchy. This is a principle of balancing information that’s “meant to be discovered” versus “meant to be looked for.” Everything can’t be important all at once.

Errors should NEVER be sent to the user that A) Are purely jargon. B) Have no information nor C) have no action. But they often do, because the sheer number of errors that can possibly happen means they probably get written in a non-handmade way (you get errors grouped by numerical values or something like that) rather than having a UX person or team do the copy writing and experience design.