Drum Warning!

by Paul Sherman on August 25, 2010 · 5 comments

From a printer manufactured (or probably more accurately, rebadged…) by a nameless large PC manufacturer based in the southwest….

This error message evokes cinematic, ominous drums beating in the distance, implying an impending massive onslaught.

At least it does for me. Your mileage may vary…

But seriously, this is a not-so-great error message for a couple of reasons:

It’s not informative – it doesn’t tell me a) what the heck a drum is, and b) why I care about a drum warning.
It doesn’t provide a recommended action – so, I have a “drum warning”…now what? WTF do I do with this information?

And if you look at the available screen real estate, there’s clearly enough room for more information.

http://tynerblain.com/scott.sehlhorst/ Scott Sehlhorst

I’ve always disliked inside-out error messages, that require users to get inside engineer’s heads. Great example. Should I route more power to the corona wire? Immerse the drum in some synthetic nutrients to invigorate the electro-luminescent biology? Break out the laser-alignment equipment de-skew the drum from the paper path?

Tell me – I want to fix it. :)

Seriously, the best messages not only tell me what to expect (as in “Something you didn’t expect just happened, or is about to happen”) and give me choices (“Click _fix it_ to make it do what you would expect, or click _ok_ to embrace change”)
http://www.usabilityblog.com/ pjsherman

Answer: break out the laser-alignment equipment. It’s the only solution. :-)
Neil Ganey

But then that means they would’ve needed to allocate Information Development resources ahead of 2 months before release…
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