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There's a certain kind of arrogance that comes from assuming that proles - I mean end users - couldn't possibly understand our technical logs, and if they have
by barrkel 6y ago
There's a certain kind of arrogance that comes from assuming that proles - I mean end users - couldn't possibly understand our technical logs, and if they have a problem they should come to us, or wait until we've analyzed the telemetry and pushed a fix.
Quite frequently, logs show up things like missing files and directories, incorrect permissions, unexpected configurations etc. which can be fixed by a sufficiently technical end user, without needing to go through support.
There's a similar problem with error dialogs. Product people always push to keep technical details out of those dialogs, even if technical users would find the details useful for accomplishing their goals, figuring out what went wrong and working around it. It's more forgiveable for dialogs, as long as there are logs.
When the logs are similarly indigestible, the software is simply less usable by technical users. Quality better be damn high, because if it breaks, and there's no way to look into the hard shiny shell, it can generate an amazing amount of frustration to people who are used to making stuff work.
(Of course the % of users who are sufficiently technical is decreasing all the time.)
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago> There's a similar problem with error dialogs. Product people always push to keep technical details out of those dialogs, even if technical users would find the details useful for accomplishing their goals, figuring out what went wrong and working around it. Lol, yes; the number of times I've seen a message to the effect of "Something broke. Contact your system administrator.", and I stare at it, and I mutter "I am the sysadmin, you stupid machine!" is excessive.
- saurik 6y agoI will also note that leaving technical information in dialog boxes is better even for non-technical "end" users, as it isn't like the app worked anyway (so the user isn't satisfied right now) and it allows those users to screenshot the dialog and show it to their friends or paste it to a forum and have other people help them (which I have seen people do constantly with my error messages, into which I always provide the most low-level raw/useful technically information I can about the error).
- ci5er 6y agoI've always been baffled by this. Especially in pop-up dialog boxes, you can have drop-down arrows hiding the ugly bits (but that said, a core dump is usually not that useful). I always thought: "Something Happened" might be the worst, ever, but I recently came upon this when setting up a Dell Desktop running Windows 10, trying to use a wireless keyboard. (I learned to always keep a USB keyboard around for bootstrapping purposes): - "No keyboard detected, press any key to continue…."