In an ideal world, nobody would have to worry about whether they could write a good error message. Programs and web sites would be flawless, therefore errors wouldn’t happen, and thus the fine art of crafting error messages would be rendered obsolete.

Sadly, real life, more often than not, follows Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will.” Thanks to that, virtually all software and websites come with written-in error messages.

Why Error Messages Are Important

If something goes wrong, the error message is the user’s only guide to what to do before they must contact customer service. People don’t like to feel clueless about how to fix something, so cryptic error messages are marks against you as a web designer. On the other hand, if you give them a chance to fix the problem themselves it will be a positive association with your we site or software, which is always valuable.

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Good error messages contain most or all of the following:

• They say what went wrong.
• They say why it went wrong.
• They tell you what to do to fix it.
• If you can’t fix it, they tell you who to contact that can.

Why Are There So Many Bad Error Messages?

Software and website designers don’t give error messages much weight. This is probably because they think their design is so well-made that you’ll never even see the error message anyway. It could also be that they just don’t know how to make an error message good. Whatever the reasoning, if you want to craft better error messages.

What Makes an Error Message Good or Bad

Good error messages provide all or most of the information written in the list above, in plain English. Bad error messages fail to list the right information, do so in such technical jargon that they’re not very helpful, or both. Error messages that make the error sound like it’s the user’s fault are also a no-no.

Some examples of bad error messages:

• Unknown Error.
• Error. Program failed to load.
• This website does not exist.
• Illegal action. Program will now terminate.

Some examples of good error messages:

• Password must be 6-10 characters long and contain at least one number.
• Program.exe couldn’t run because your computer does not have the minimum amount of RAM necessary for it to operate. Please ensure that you have at least 2GB of RAM installed and run the program again.
• Whoops! Looks like you tried to access a page on this website that is either down for maintenance or is no longer available. Please click your browser’s “back” button to get back to the site again–sorry about that.
• The file you are trying to access is corrupt. Please reinstall the program and try again.

No More 404

Finally, make sure your error message actually is a message. Never write just an error code, such as “404”- the computer knows what the numbers mean, but the average user doesn’t.

Before considering it finished, test your error message on a non-technical person. If they can make sense of it, you’ve succeeded.

This is a guest post by Aimee Sway, blogging for PrintExpress.co.uk, the premiere online printing company. Follow her on Twitter @PrintExpressUK and like on Facebook!