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I can understand their argument. As the resident 'technology expert' in my various social and familial circles, I've had to deal with and explain the answers to

by korethr 11y ago

I can understand their argument. As the resident 'technology expert' in my various social and familial circles, I've had to deal with and explain the answers to questions such as "Why did my computer just become illegal?", and "What's a domain timeout?" various times. But things can go too far the other way, as well. When the guy who's job it is to understand the system and make it work is being frustrated by the error message, then you're doing it wrong. IMO, a workable happy medium is the giving the ability to expand the error message to get the dirty operational details, an error code, or similar. That way, the support tech, power user, engineer, etc, dealing with "Why is the Internet broken?", can have some data to help him figure out how to unbreak the Internet today.

mikeash 11y ago
Yeah, they've clearly gone too far the other way here. Their new error message is friendlier, sure, but it's also much less useful. Don't force people to understand how the Internet works... but allow them to! If there was a DNS problem and the app gave me that BS error at the end instead of telling me it's a DNS problem, I'd be a little angry. How am I supposed to troubleshoot that? By all means, don't put "request timed out" front and center. But please make it available.
vacri 11y ago
You could do it the Microsoft way: Have a generic friendly message with an error code attached. Then you can go online to look up the specific error code (sometimes there is a handy link in the error), and get an empty or broken page which was supposed to explain it.
- zarify 11y ago
  Not much help if the device giving you the error is also your primary means of looking up error codes. Would much rather the "more details" pattern where you have a link/button at the bottom of the error which actually explains it or gives access to the original error they were covering up.
librvf 11y ago
> IMO, a workable happy medium is the giving the ability to expand the error message to get the dirty operational details, an error code, or similar. That way, the support tech, power user, engineer, etc, dealing with "Why is the Internet broken?", can have some data to help him figure out how to unbreak the Internet today. Or write it to a user-accessible log file. Opaque error messages that fail to accurately describe the problem out of a misguided desire to coddle users drive me bonkers.

by korethr 11y ago

mikeash 11y ago

Yeah, they've clearly gone too far the other way here. Their new error message is friendlier, sure, but it's also much less useful. Don't force people to understand how the Internet works... but allow them to! If there was a DNS problem and the app gave me that BS error at the end instead of telling me it's a DNS problem, I'd be a little angry. How am I supposed to troubleshoot that? By all means, don't put "request timed out" front and center. But please make it available.

vacri 11y ago

You could do it the Microsoft way: Have a generic friendly message with an error code attached. Then you can go online to look up the specific error code (sometimes there is a handy link in the error), and get an empty or broken page which was supposed to explain it.

zarify 11y ago
Not much help if the device giving you the error is also your primary means of looking up error codes. Would much rather the "more details" pattern where you have a link/button at the bottom of the error which actually explains it or gives access to the original error they were covering up.

librvf 11y ago

> IMO, a workable happy medium is the giving the ability to expand the error message to get the dirty operational details, an error code, or similar. That way, the support tech, power user, engineer, etc, dealing with "Why is the Internet broken?", can have some data to help him figure out how to unbreak the Internet today. Or write it to a user-accessible log file. Opaque error messages that fail to accurately describe the problem out of a misguided desire to coddle users drive me bonkers.