Wednesday, March 12, 2008

SEWM #1 UI Error Messages

I am Starting new category to achieve this . SEWM - Software Engineer With in Me under this category I will post new things which releated to software ,softwares, softwares their designs which I come across in my day to day professional as well as my personal life which needs to be archived in /dev/null



I remember reading this article from Joel where he imposes how UI screen needs to be designed and he lefts few corollary , I am reproducing it again ,


If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface that is 90%
worse, they will think that the program is 90% worse

If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100%
beautiful, they will think the program is almost done




Thats quiet true.



What about UI Error messages ? Thats should be even appropriate to make the normal end user understand whats happening No need to tell for an Web Application .



Here is a error message which I encountered during online Transaction in this bank.




How z that? Didn't get connection from connection pooling . Yep.. Gosh.. ! How the normal user know about Connection pooling? Even most of the techie seems to be unaware of what is connection pooling. So this UI design should be archived in /dev/null .


Have you ever watched error message due to connection lost in GTalk , Heres how ,

unable to connect.. check your connection

when connection is up with an nice attracted message (I love this one!)

...and, we're back!


Thats how the messages should be understandable even to a normal users.
Thats all for now :)

1 comment:

Siva Anandhi said...

Day-to-day thing. But worth mentioning!.
I've posted my exp. on a similar one. Chk tht out.