Why error messages matters more than it looks

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Error messages is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The reason this keeps coming up

Say what went wrong and what to do about it. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Never blame the person reading the message. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Where it usually goes wrong

Put the error next to the field that caused it. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

The short version

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Three things worth confirming about error messages before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Put the error next to the field that caused it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.