Comment by Sohcahtoa82
2 days ago
> after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages.
Related to this, I will never for the life of me understand why people think it's okay to say "I get an error" without saying what the error is.
I don't expect a non-technical person to understand the error, but I do expect a non-technical person to know that what the error message is is useful to the person trying to help you and to proactively provide the contents of the error message, even if it's a shitty cell phone picture of the error.
The thing is, they've still taken the time to actually write "I get an error". So by principle of reciprocity, you can just take 2 seconds to say, "What's the error?" Usually that won't lead anywhere; but as long as you don't spend more time than they are, you aren't really wasting much time; and they can't exactly complain that you weren't helpful. And occasionally it will lead somewhere, in which case it's a win.
Because modern tech and modern tech support has a terrible UX in general built by engineers around their engineering heuristics.
By the time a non-tech user reaches the point of seeing an error they are cognitively overloaded and since the errors are pretty much incomprehensible to the users, the user doesn’t get the feeling of it being anything that’s tied to their actions. It’s just anxiety-inducing noise, it never registers as something that has a meaning, so even copying and pasting an error feels like a meaningless step that their overloaded and already anxious brains skip.
If errors are meant to be shared with tech support, the UX should reflect that (and some interfaces do that where you just have a button to send the crash report or smth). If errors are meant to give users agency to solve the problem on their own, the UX should reflect that too.