This is something I feel like enough people don’t appreciate. One of the ways I like to explain this is by this old tweet of mine:
The evolution of an error message:
- No error message
- A one-line message
- “Expected: … / Actual: …”
- “Here’s what went wrong: …”
- “Here’s what you should do: …”
- I automated away what you should do
- The invalid state is no longer representable
One of the common gripes I will hear about error messages is that they don’t tell the user what to do, but if you stop to think about it: if the error message knew exactly what you were supposed to do instead then your tool could just fix it for you (by automatically doing the right thing instead).
“But wait!”, you might say, “sometimes an error message can’t automatically fix the problem for you because there’s not necessarily a right or obvious way to fix the problem or the user’s intent is not clear.” Yes, exactly, which brings us back to the original point:
Error messages are necessarily bad because they cannot anticipate what you should have done instead. If an error message could read your mind then they’d eventually evolve into something better than an error message. This creates a selection bias where the only remaining error messages are the ones that can’t read your mind.