Back in the early days of my career and supporting end users, I used to constantly get people say:
“xxx doesn’t work. I just get an error”
They would never tell me what the error message actually was. And when I asked, the reply often was
“I don’t remember. I’ve closed it now”.
It used to wind me up rotten. I can forget non-technical people not understanding the error message. But common sense should have kicked in that the error message is important to share with the person trying to fix said error.
Maybe all errors should be presented with a simple, distinctive and memorable theme - e.g. show a pig photo in that one maybe they'll remember "I got the pig error"
> Maybe all errors should be presented with a simple, distinctive and memorable theme - e.g. show a pig photo in that one maybe they'll remember "I got the pig error"
This sounds like the thing that they do in parking garages where each level will have a color, an image, or sometimes even a musical theme. (Which is to say, it sounds like a good idea!)
I was thinking celebrities, but then people will misidentify them.
Each micro-service (in 2025?!?!) would have different pictures of a particular celebrity, for different errors.. so if the user says e.g. "I see Taylor Swift doing..." the support can say "Let me forward you to the S3 people!".
You can dunk on lay people all you want, personally I'm a lot more furious about fellow programmers who thinks it's OK to show an error that says "file not found" without any context like the filename.
