> When a literate, educated user cannot even read a message presented on the screen (and I don't mean understand or act upon the message, I merely mean read it)...
This is usually trained into users by non-existent or awful error handling and messages in the majority of software. How the industry addresses errors is haphazard at best, and I see lots of evidence of what I call "checkbox/boilerplate project management" in lots of software products. The classic symptom is an error throws a message along the lines of "Foo Error: there was a foo type of error"; it is an error message, so I guess it got marked as a successful part of somebody's sprint by its mere existence, and not evaluated on its utility.
The industry should be hiring legions of editors with red markers to up our communications game when it comes to error messages.
To an extent, yes. I can understand why users will ignore error messages when they're in the middle of doing something else. I can even understand why they might ignore them when things are going wrong. But where it crosses the line for me is when an expert is helping them and asks them, "Can you read me the error message?" And they plead computer-ignorance and refuse. (Yes, this really does happen.)
This is usually trained into users by non-existent or awful error handling and messages in the majority of software. How the industry addresses errors is haphazard at best, and I see lots of evidence of what I call "checkbox/boilerplate project management" in lots of software products. The classic symptom is an error throws a message along the lines of "Foo Error: there was a foo type of error"; it is an error message, so I guess it got marked as a successful part of somebody's sprint by its mere existence, and not evaluated on its utility.
The industry should be hiring legions of editors with red markers to up our communications game when it comes to error messages.