Use a scoring rubric to objectively assess error message quality based on their visibility, communication, and efficiency. Involve your colleagues and reduce skepticism of your analysis.
You need efficient error messages to keep users engaged in their workflow. Follow these four efficiency guidelines to design error messages that respect users' effort and offer time-saving guidance.
Communicate effectively with your error messages by using human-readable language, concisely and precisely describing the issue, offering constructive advice, and not blaming the user.
Error messages can be a crucial point in the user experience. To be effective, they must be clearly visible, which can be accomplished by displaying them close to the error's source, using noticeable, redundant, and accessible indicators, designing them based on their impact, and avoiding displaying them prematurely.
When humans interact with computers, mistakes and misunderstandings are inevitable. In these situations, good error messages are a vital tool to avoid frustrations and provide a satisfying user experience.
Users waste unacceptably much time struggling with computer bugs. Users' mental models suffer when systems don't work as advertised, leading people to question their understanding of the UX.
Using a modal dialog to display an error message can cause usability problems on mobile devices. Error handling must respect human-memory constraints and remain visible as the user is fixing the problem.
User errors while using computers take two forms: slips (right intent, wrong action) and mistakes (wrong intent). Understanding the differences between the types of user error will help you design to prevent or minimize these problems.
Do you need to mark fields as "required" in forms on your website or in apps? What if all fields are required? And what is the best way to show that a form field is required?
No. 9 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to write error messages that help users understand the problem and to provide information that constructively teaches users how to recover from the error.
No. 5 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to prevent interaction problems from occurring in the first place: either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation dialog.
Change blindness is the tendency for people to overlook things that change outside their focus of attention. In user interface design, this explains why screen changes that seem striking to the designer can be completely ignored by users.
