I saw this on slashdot yesterday and thought it may be worth bringing up:
Being in IT and Web Development, I have this problem all the time–a user calls up with a problem, but can’t accurately describe the problem or error.
So to help, maybe add a recognizable icon to the error, like a cake, bear, strawberry, etc. And maybe use the “no” symbol like in a “no smoking” sign".
Then maybe instead of a user saying “it won’t work” or “I don’t know what the error said”, they’d say “it was a bear error” or “it was a cake error”, and you’d know that it was a database connection error or and invalid input error, or some such thing.
I like where you’re going with the images for error messages. I can still see the problem being that the user can’t tell you what he/she was doing to create the error - just that they saw a cake. If you had a different image for every possible action and error for that action it would get pretty cumbersome.
Nice idea - for a private website.
I’d personally never add such things to a professional website, at least not with such images.
Stylish icons (matching the business and the site layout) could be OK though.
But as Jeff said - the users often don’t know the way they produced the error, if you ask them they say “I clicked this and that and here” - and often can’t even reproduce it by themselves
Perhaps this could be a useful use of click-tracking…“You clicked this and that, now talk to the bear and whine for mercy for producing such a mess!” lol
In the past I’ve had error messages stored in the database when they occurred. This worked well in that I would capture certain aspects such as the user browser and the page that actually had the error. For the most part, this allowed me to know exactly what was going wrong. For the more serious errors (such as a 404) I would also have an email sent to an error mailbox for follow-up.
Still - I’m liking the idea of using imagery for user recognition. I’d be interested to hear how others might have implemented this.
Anything is better then “Call System Administrator for assistance”. Was working on installing and testing a program when that error came up. I looked over at the person doing the install and asked “I am the System Administrator right? What does this mean?” Took us a few days to figure out all the errors that would cause the same error message to come up.
Anything you can do to make it easier for people to remember the little pop up error message that they clicked okay to, is helpful in trouble shooting problems.
I like the idea of different icons for different errors.
