Overly-anthropomorphised dialog boxes (such as pop-up offers on web sites, not so much on operating system controls) bug me in the same way. Instead of "Yes, please" and "No, thank you" buttons, I would prefer simply "Yes" and "No". I'm giving orders to a machine not talking to a person!
The one I hate is the error message that simply says "Something went wrong." maybe with a frowning cat icon, but with no other diagnostic message that could be used to determined what exactly went wrong and what corrective action to take.
This annoys me so much, and it's another reason I hate phone apps, because they do this all the time. Usually ANY error resolves to "something went wrong". I'm not expecting a stack trace, but they're too scared to show the user ANY tech jargon at all, and it's another reason why young people are computer illiterate. At least I can access the developer console on modern webshit when using an actual computer.
I had to logcat an app recently which failed with no error at all incidentally, to find out it was overzealous DNS blocking that prevented it from talking to its api endpoint. I don't to Android development, but I'm guessing apps would be aware of name resolution failures, and should be able to tell the user about it, without using fucking logcat.
> error message that simply says "Something went wrong."
Actually, are there HCI guidelines for communicating inexplicable internal errors to the user? I definitely write assertions that really should never ever fail - if they do, we are in a completely unanticipated state. Either there's been a truly massive logic bug, or maybe even a memory error flipped a bit, but in either case, I have no idea what state the program is in or what caused it to get there.
What would a good tech writer tell the user in this situation? I can't think of anything all that much more helpful than "something went wrong". Maybe "There is a serious bug in the program, totally our fault, please help us by reporting it"?
I'm not a user, but to me the problem with the empty "something went wrong" is not that it that it obscures the error details but that it obscures the failed action. What exactly went wrong? Should I retry my last action? Is my data safe? Is it safe to close the program/app without saving?
If the user is to report a bug, then any additional information would be better than "Something Went Wrong." "Something Went Wrong" is the equivalent of the guy who calls into the IT helpdesk and says "My computer isn't working."
Surely, somewhere in the code, there is an if() statement, and you're displaying the "Something Went Wrong" dialog in the else() clause. You could at least add some context that the user can copy down, so that the bug report that will come later helps you find the bug.
Steve Summit liked to tell the story of an early Mac application with a distinct UI flourish: for dialog messages indicating success, the label on the button to dismiss the dialog would be changed to "Yay!"; for error messages, it would be changed to "Damn!".
Just another item on the long list of Things Done in the 80s That We Couldn't Get Away With Today.
