3 ms·

Apple's policy has been to show error messages when the user can do something with the information. And in most cases trying again is the only thing they can do

Apple's policy has been to show error messages when the user can do something with the information. And in most cases trying again is the only thing they can do so it tends to be minimal. Also I suspect many of those issues you're seeing involve asynchronous behaviour which is a hard UX challenge to solve. You could send a push notification that an update has failed on the server but often the user has moved onto something else.

pavlov 4y ago
Even returning the most bog-standard message like "Try again (Error #12345)" would be immensely more helpful than having the UI simply do nothing, unclear on whether it's still working or not. Sure, async UI is hard, but the world's richest corporation with a reputation for UX excellence could afford to try at least.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  This. You have nailed it. And why does Support and Marketing push back on that idea? Because they don't like when a customer reaches Support and says "I got error #12345! What should I do?" They'd much rather the customer just shut up and go away however, the programmer who put 12345 in the code would dearly love to know that it was hit.
alpaca128 4y ago
An infinite loading animation and similar things are very ambiguous. Is my wifi connection bad right now? Is the OS acting up because I haven't rebooted the device in two months? Is a server down/unreachable? This wide range of possibilities is very frustrating because it often means you have a long, unsuccessful troubleshooting session ahead.
perlgeek 4y ago
When you have an error message you don't understand, at least you can google for it. If something simply doesn't work, there could be many possible underlying causes, and finding a list of possible errors and going through all of them is much more frustrating.

3 ms·

Apple's policy has been to show error messages when the user can do something with the information. And in most cases trying again is the only thing they can do

by threeseed 4y ago

pavlov 4y ago
Even returning the most bog-standard message like "Try again (Error #12345)" would be immensely more helpful than having the UI simply do nothing, unclear on whether it's still working or not. Sure, async UI is hard, but the world's richest corporation with a reputation for UX excellence could afford to try at least.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  This. You have nailed it. And why does Support and Marketing push back on that idea? Because they don't like when a customer reaches Support and says "I got error #12345! What should I do?" They'd much rather the customer just shut up and go away however, the programmer who put 12345 in the code would dearly love to know that it was hit.
alpaca128 4y ago
An infinite loading animation and similar things are very ambiguous. Is my wifi connection bad right now? Is the OS acting up because I haven't rebooted the device in two months? Is a server down/unreachable? This wide range of possibilities is very frustrating because it often means you have a long, unsuccessful troubleshooting session ahead.
perlgeek 4y ago
When you have an error message you don't understand, at least you can google for it. If something simply doesn't work, there could be many possible underlying causes, and finding a list of possible errors and going through all of them is much more frustrating.