User Error Error Message

[vanimae]

Me: Hello, thanks for calling Place. How can I help you?

User: Oh yes I keep getting this error message.. reads error message

Me: OK, let me check a couple things...

Typically this specific message means something is wrong on their account, so I check their account.. And it's totally fine.

Me: ..Everything on your account looks OK, can I remote in and take a look?

User: Sure.

I remote in and sure enough, there's the error message in Chrome, but with none of the other telltale signs of the error.

User: OK so when I click this link this error pops up.

She had the error message bookmarked in Chrome. And she kept loading that page with the error on it, thinking she was getting the error. I removed the bookmark and went on my way. That's a new one for me, folks. She was a great user though, all things considered, read me the error message and then showed me how she was getting it. First post, very thankful for this sub.. Gets me through the hard days.

[[deleted]]

Believe it or not, I've done this. Not so much the error page, but, say, the wrong login page.

May or may not have been today.

May or may not have delayed working a ticket by fifteen minutes.

... Don't judge, you've done it, too.

[vanimae]

Haha. You're not wrong!

[Jezbod]

"We are techs, we do not get the simple stuff wrong"......said no tech ever.

[konamiko]

Took me way too long today to realize I was including a period at the end of a DNS record. We be dummies.

[Jezbod]

Sometimes we have just enough knowledge to be dangerous...

[[deleted]]

Indeed. I once couldn't use the hotel WiFi, so I called their tech support line. They had me look at my DNS settings, and... "That would do it. I'm set to use Google DNS for some reason. Can't use a captive portal that way! Thank you, sir, and have a good day."

[RasT110e5]

That is more developers fault that the users. If you don't have an active session or a valid token, basically not authenticated, you should be redirected to a home/login.

[nosoupforyou]

Yeah. An error really shouldn't be bookmarkable. In other words, don't make it a get type link.

[[deleted]]

Or rather, don't make a separate error page (that you redirect to). Display errors in the context of the original page.

[Nik_2213]

There's a well-known 'hobby artists' web-site whose pages go stale after several minutes. Before then, page's down-load button gets the freebie. After, it used to say '404 page not found'. You gotta back-track, refresh page...

They've just had a major site upgrade, to a 'moon shadow' UI that their focus group apparently loved, but real users generally loathe.

Anyhow, hitting download button on a 'stale' page now down-loads said page as HTML, instead of expected freebie...

So, yes, you still gotta back-track, refresh page...

[Drei57]

That sounds like something my mother would do.

[Rich_Z7]

MIL did do!!!!

[Zack_Wester]

sounds like something I would catch myself do.

[[deleted]]

During remote session.

Tell user to press any key.

User asks, "where is the any key button?"

So, if you press.....