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Everyone is snickering at this and talking about philosophy, but there is actually a legitimate point being made here, albeit obliquely: how do you explain to a
by lisper 2y ago
Everyone is snickering at this and talking about philosophy, but there is actually a legitimate point being made here, albeit obliquely: how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? I submit that this is a nontrivial problem worthy of serious consideration.
- klysm 2y agoI find most apps give up an enumerating the possibly modes of consistency violation that can occur in an app. I’ve tried and failed to do it “right” before and it’s incredibly difficult.
- mrmanner 2y agoMaybe pose it as a question to the user, rather than an error message: “This message has been deleted from the server. Do you want to: - discard it permanently - store this version on the server - save as a file to your computer”
- mkl 2y ago> how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? How about: "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently deleted."
- femto 2y agoA typical person's head will explode at the mention of the words "cache" and "server". They will then go into a blind panic that their data is going to be "permanently deleted".
- rovr138 2y ago"locally", "the cloud"
- SoftTalker 2y agoYeah you can't use words like that. Even many people who won't panic at the word "server" don't really understand what it is. "This message no longer exists in your Inbox. If you close it, you will not be able to open it again." What's more amazing is that this state actually happens often enough in Outlook that somebody wrote code to detect it, and to create a message box for the user to warn them about it.
- chii 2y agoevery warning or labelling of an issue is because it happened to somebody, and it needed to be prevented. It's true in the physical world - signs like 'beware of falling pottery' for example. The electronic world is a facsimile of the real world!
- eviks 2y agoNot an issue, replace server with the cloud and remove cache, temporary is fine
- IshKebab 2y agoSo what? Most users will understand this or at least get the gist. My mum can ask me what it means and then I can tell her. That's a much better outcome than the original message.
- 2y ago
- phreack 2y agoI'd say a non-tech user has no idea what a server or cache is. I'd go with the word "backup" instead. Something like telling them that email is not backed up (online? where?) and if they delete it from their computer it won't be able to be recovered.
- OmarShehata 2y agothis is the only correct answer. "a non-technical user has no idea what a server or cache is" sure, but they can learn. The average person is much smarter than you think they are (when it comes to matters that actually affect their day to day life). If they don't get your explanation, it's almost always because (1) they don't care, they don't see why it matters to them (it often doesn't) (2) you're not explaining it well enough feynman has a nice philosophy on this that I think is true & useful: (that there's great variety in capability of the average person, we should explain things faithfully & without dumbing it down): https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@omarshehata/112378359360292715 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@omarshehata/1123783593602927...
- bongodongobob 2y agoThe problem is that people's brains just fucking shut down once it's computer related. "What was the error message?" "Idk I didn't read it." "Well here it is, it's asking for your password." "Ok what should I do?" This type of shit is more common than it should be. So many people just give up on computer related things that isn't the happy path.
- CGamesPlay 2y agoCounterpoint, when a random dialog asks for a password, the answer is not always "give the password", so maybe that's part of the reason why people find it so confusing.
- bongodongobob 2y agoWhen you can't open Outlook because you're getting an error, ya might need to fuckin sign in. This is sadly a common occurrence.
- anatnom 2y agoIf those users aren't reading the error dialogs anyways, why do the error dialogs need to pander to those users? I wonder if the "make it dumb enough for every user to understand" approach leads to user comprehension plateauing prematurely.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- stall84 2y agoYeah but that would be taking nearly all of the Microsoft out of it ...
- qwertox 2y agoHow about a dialog with the buttons "Try again", "Save to file...", "Copy to clipboard" and "Discard contents"?
- pquki4 2y agoFunny of you to think your non-technical uncle is aware that there is such a thing as "mail server". All they know is that this email thing works, in the sense that he can send and receive emails.
- ranger207 2y agoDoes anyone have any real studies about whether users will "have their heads explode" when presented with technical language? Apple and Microsoft did user studies for this sort of thing in the 80s and 90s, right? Has anyone done similar in the 00s, 10s, and 20s?
- mtVessel 2y agoDo we really need to? I'd lay odds that the effect remains the same: users dismiss the error/warning without reading it.
- cafed00d 2y agoThere are only two acceptable solutions to this problem: 1. No error message. Just recover the cached message. 2. The message is deleted There’s a world we live in where ahem-ahem a certain design focused company would’ve done it this way. Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the Mail app to make a decision on whether to recover the cached message or not. It’s those engineers & designers who built that damn cache in the first place. And the server too. Let _them_ deal with the consequences of messages existing in one but not the other. It’s not the user’s job to care.
- lostlogin 2y agoHow about your phrasing? ‘your data has been deleted on the server, but that your client still has a cached copy’
- bongodongobob 2y ago"Hello IT? Yes, all my data has been deleted please help! Something about a cash-ay and the server is down!"
- smsm42 2y agoThat's why you always have people to either copy-paste error messages or send screenshots. Because people are terrible at reading and even worse at reproducing what they read.
- caseyy 2y ago> how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? “The message has been deleted, but your app still shows it. You will not be able to see the message again if you discard it, and it will disappear soon.”
- mtVessel 2y ago"What do you mean 'it's been deleted?' It's right here! Stupid computers..."
- mortenjorck 2y agoSome good passes at UX copy in this thread, but for this application, I’d recommend against trying to explain the underlying technical mechanism at play and instead frame it in terms of outcomes. “This message has been deleted, but you still have a temporary copy. If you need to save anything from it, you should do so before discarding the temporary copy.”
- vsnf 2y agoThis is the best one so far. Combine that with the 'if you refresh this page the text will disappear' from another poster and I think we have a very workable error message that outlines the issue, solution, and due caution necessary, for the potentially non-technical user.
- khendron 2y agoYou don't. Explaining what happened is not going to help the user at all. You can only explain what options are available to the user. Something like the following "Sorry, this message can no longer be saved. Copy this message before discarding it if you will need access to it later."
- chii 2y ago"Copy it to where?" Or, "Can't i just restore it out of the trash?"
- Too 2y agoSorry but hard disagree on this one. This increasingly popular assumption that users are clueless cavemen is very condescending. Help the user self diagnose instead. WHY can’t it be saved? Is the internet not connected? Check your WiFi. Is the server full? Talk to admin. Is the message deleted by another user? Talk to your team about ways of working? Is it an internal application error? Tough luck, maybe the error code can be googled at least. This does not mean you need to dump a stack trace in the users face, the examples above can still be presented briefly. If that’s too much effort to implement, consider an expandable details section. The amount of applications lately where I had to open the verbose developer logs only to find silly user fixable errors is astonishing. Last one was simply credentials that had expired. To anyone who thinks you are giving the users a magical experience, free from technicalities, by hiding root causes behind a facade of abstract, please think again. You are just frustrating the users even more, by making errors unpredictable.
- edanm 2y ago> This increasingly popular assumption that users are clueless cavemen is very condescending. Sorry, but no. And this idea that everyone else is condescending is offensive nonsense. I understand where you're coming from, but the people who understand how actual users behave and what actual users want, in the real world, are not condescending - they're empathic. They recognize that the majority of people in the world are not like us, in terms of technical abilities, yes, but more importantly, in terms of desires. The average user doesn't care. They don't have time to do things like "talk to admin", nor do they even know what "check your wifi" means. "Talk to your team about ways of working"? I'm sure most employees would just love to go and have awkward conversations with others, that's exactly what they want to do this minute. This is even on the off-chance that the user has even read the message, which is incredibly unlikely. I can't count the number of times I've had developers tell me they had an error message and don't know what to do, and my solution was "let's read it, it says this is the error" and that being revelatory for them.
- rpigab 2y agoYes, let’s try to explain technical things to non technical people without using technical words and pretend we're getting somewhere and that it's useful for them.
- alehlopeh 2y agoWhy delete the copy on the client at all?