How to get users to read error messages?

Question

If you program for a nontechnical audience, you find yourself at a high risk that users will not read your carefully worded and enlightening error messages, but just click o

Answer 1

Less errors

If an application throws vomit at you on a regular basis, you become immune to it, and errors become irritating background muzak. If an error is a rare event, it will garner more attention.

Quosh anything which isn't a major deal, throw out all those warnings, find ways of understanding user intent, take out the decisions wherever possible. I have a few apps which I continue to streamline in this way. Developers see every error as important, but this is not true from a user perspective. Look for the users' common response to a problem and capture that, deploy that as your response.

If you do need to raise an error: short, concise, low terror factor, no exclamation marks. Paragraphs are fail.

There's no silver bullet, but you need to socially engineer to make errors important.