Who’s Proofreading Your Error Messages?
I was rolling through some programs (that is, contest Web sites) the other day, and I hit upon a motherlode of misspelled error messages:
Some developers will make the case that the last one refers to the Your Birthdate field, but it’s still weird to read.
I’d like to point out that I did not have to troll a bunch of contests to find these three examples. This is three out of five I visited. In 60% of the Web sites I visited, the error messages contained misspellings and other problems (such as poor placement in the last case).
A user who encounters an error and then encounters your error message, if your error message is rife with misspellings or other problems, the user might think that the error was the fault of your crappy application and not his or her problem.
So you need to pay attention to your error messaging and display as much as any other feature of your application. Because if your error message isn’t part of the solution (that is, helping the user understand what’s wrong and how to fix it), it’s part of the problem.
