Made out of people

When Usability Goes Wrong

Usability people are good folk. It's important to be out there for the user, asking how a message will be interpreted, what will be read, and what's the clearest way to phrase it.

But sometimes, the usability person's notes don't cut it.

In this case, for example, I'm pretty sure that there was an original error message: "The server could not handle your request. Please try again." And the usability expert wrote some comments to guide them:

• What do you mean by "server"?
• What sort of "request" did the user make? They thought they were playing a media stream!
• How did it fail?
• In what way should they try again? Do they need to tweak a setting?

The developer--who really doesn't care about error messages--promptly answered those questions. With this display:

which manages to answer every question, but not handle any of them.

But I'm glad that if I ever need to find out what a server is, I can just check my smartphone's error message.