Design vs Art Blog

Explaining errors is one of the basic concepts in usability for the web. It is as simple and obvious as telling the user what was wrong and how to solve that problem.

"It is important that error messages are clear…"

There are many ways of explaining errors, like going back to the web form marking the erroneous fields. It is important that error messages are clear, avoid things like "error 4055".

Digg, the social bookmarking website, displays from time to time an error message at the end of the submission procedure. I don’t really know why this happens because the error message is not clear, no solution is proposed and there is no entry about that on the FAQ section. The user experience could not be worse in this situation.

See previous entries about this topic.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Why a merge between Microsoft and Yahoo! could be bad for the designer community? We know how bad Internet Explorer is and we also know that Microsoft does not want to adopt many standards. Even worse, its tactics to promote IE are a little bit obscure.

Bad Company + Bad Company = Really Bad Company

Yesterday I was checking the MSN Game Zone, a MSN section that has some free online games. I was shocked when I read that MSN Games can only be played if the user has Internet Explorer. Then I thought, maybe this is not fine and maybe a merge of Microsoft and Yahoo! is not a good idea.

What if Microsoft makes most of Yahoo! services IE-only compatible? Then, a software that does not respect standards will become more and more popular. This means more headaches for web designers and that websites will start having more bugs, with a decrease in quality, usability and user experience. 

Popularity: 20% [?]