Question

I’m curious if anyone has given some thought to the wording in desktop application error messages. As a developer I always put on my programmer hat and display it in a dialect that looks like a robot is speaking to the user.

For example:

• Failed to open file ___
• Unable to retrieve settings file
• Error occurred updating the database
• Cannot set ____
• Unknown error occured

None of these say ‘friendly application’. Does anyone know any resources or ways of phrasing errors in less robotic language – for common errors like IO problems, database issues, null reference and so on.

Answer 1

There’s quite an extensive article on error messages in the Windows Desktop Design guide.