Rachel M. Murray
Can't help but blame the user
It's funny to me that after how many years of usability and language analysis of our software applications - that we still use outdated language in our interactions with computers. "A fatal error", huh? Now I know not to panic when I see, "fatal error", but how many users are at my skill level? Did I break the U of T email system, or was that just a poor choice of words? How about "A problem with our database has occured" then error message, then "We've noted what's gone wrong. Please reload your screen - sorry for any inconvenience".
This is not a coding issue - this is a language issue...always easy to solve if you stop to consider them when you're building your database products...
Taken from the University of Toronto's recent upgrade of their webmail interface - which probably makes it funny and ironic to me.
Can't help but blame the user
It's funny to me that after how many years of usability and language analysis of our software applications - that we still use outdated language in our interactions with computers. "A fatal error", huh? Now I know not to panic when I see, "fatal error", but how many users are at my skill level? Did I break the U of T email system, or was that just a poor choice of words? How about "A problem with our database has occured" then error message, then "We've noted what's gone wrong. Please reload your screen - sorry for any inconvenience".
This is not a coding issue - this is a language issue...always easy to solve if you stop to consider them when you're building your database products...
Taken from the University of Toronto's recent upgrade of their webmail interface - which probably makes it funny and ironic to me.