Rach Smith's Notes & Nuggets

Oops! There's an oops in our error messages

note : development Added November 1, 2022

Link: When life gives you lemons, write better error messages

I've always hated error messages that start with "oops!". Like, your website or app is preventing me from doing the thing I need to do, and you're gonna say "oops"?? "oops"??!

Unfortunately, when I started at CodePen, there were error messages with "oops." I didn't go on an immediate crusade to change them all because "I don't like it, ew" isn't a good enough reason to pitch a change to the product.

I like articles like this because they provide evidence to support the opinions that I came to based on my intuition alone.

Over time as whole sections of the codebase have been rewritten, I've gradually removed the oopses and some other American colloquialisms from our website copy.

Thanks for reading! If you'd like to share your thoughts you can reply by email or hit me up on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Comments

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  • Mike Healy

    cPanel or PhpMyAdmin has a loading message telling users to be patient. I've always disliked that. Tell me things are loading, and I'll decide for myself if I want to be patient or not thanks.