What do you know about the error rates on your service? And how can you write more effective error messages?
I was very happy that UK Cross-Government Content Club invited me to speak at what turned out to be their very first meeting. They were kind enough to accept my suggestion of “Error messages and error rates” as my topic, and I asked attendees to do a little preparation by spending no more that 15 minutes finding out what, if anything, the service they were working on did to track their error rates.
The session was one of my first chances to try out my 2025 topic
In 2025, I’m focusing on error rates and data quality as I explain in a blogpost in May: Error rates and data quality – my 2025 topic.
Some errors are rather trivial – just a moment of inconvenience where someone has to try again to answer a question. But some are really important, leading to embarrassing headlines as a department has to accept responsibility for a major administrative mistake.
In this session, we compared what participants had found out about any tracking their own service is doing, and also took a look at a new five-aspect framework for errors to see whether we think it is helpful.
I described six categories of error messages
As content designers, we have lots of experience of writing error messages. But do we ever have the chance to find out how effective those messages are in practice? What error rates do we have in our services? Is there anything we can do as content designers to reduce them?
I outlined six types of error message, with plenty of examples :
- Cute or funny
- “Charlie Wilkins”
- “Well, doh” messages
- Mechanical help
- Decision help
- Silent
We followed this up by having a go at improving one error message to make it more effective.
Thank you to everyone who took part
It was fantastic to see almost 200 UK government content designers on this inaugural call. Thank you to them for the sharing and ideas, and to Roger Wyatt, Senior Content Designer in Cabinet Office Digital, for the invitation to be a part of the new Content Club. You can view the workshop slides below.