mike's web log/comments

Scott Hanselman muses about what he terms "Conversational Error Messages (CEMs)" in Microsoft Max. I have been on the authoring end of many an error message, so I speak fluent error-message-ese. That said, my first contract job at Microsoft was on the ill-fated Bob (also #[1]), a product that I stoutly maintain had some great ideas in it, poorly executed. Among its appeals, I thought, was that it attempted to address the user in the kind of terms that another human might.

Anyway, crafting an error message in human terms is perhaps not as easy as it might seem. The impersonal tone of many error messages arises out of a set of guidelines that include discouraging anthropomorphizing the machine, avoiding humor, avoiding the suggestion that the user is in any way responsible for the error condition, and crafting a message that can be localized.

This last has implications not just for the language itself, but for the structure of the sentences -- for example, we must avoid dropping parameterized values into sentences in such a way that the parameter value has grammatical connotations such as number, (grammatical) gender, or (grammatical) case. Something like "Copying the %s file to %s" can have all sorts of problems in a translation. And you might be surprised at how hard it can be to create a message that is culture neutral and thus localizable. Non-U.S. cultures can have quite different ideas about formality, about directness, about ownership ("my" is tricky), and so on.

Incidentally, and I'm sure many people know this, stupid error messages like "Unknown error" or the like are often the result of a higher-level process encountering a lower-level error and not having any further information. Thus componentization and imperfectly implemented error handling. Sometimes the process that's talking to you just doesn't know what's wrong, only that something got horked somewhere.

Anyway, all this aside, kudos to the Max folks for trying to come up with error messages that people might read at least once.[2] From the look of their web site, the Max team is trying hard to present a human face to their customers. (A blog, too.) More power to 'em, sez me.

And speaking of error messages. Michael B found this 404 page. Give it a few seconds to start. (And have a look at the source -- talk about yer client-side UI, heh.)


[1] Another place where Bob survives is in the "Utopia"-themed stuff in Windows, such as sound effects.

[2] But rarely more than that, as has been noted by, among others, Eric Lippert ("From a user perspective, dialog boxes are impediments to productivity.") and Raymond Chen ("Users ignore all error messages. Even error messages that tell how to fix the error!").