justaddwater.dk

We all know that giving the user a correct error message is essential. It is important that the message is clearly visible and written in a way so that there is no doubt what the problem is.

Today I was updating my profile photo on Technorati (the current one was of the little fellow in the top banner of this site, and the new was the same that I use on this blog).

So I went to Account -> Your Photo at Technorati, clicked the “Browse” button, located the photo on my hard drive and clicked “Upload”. But apparently something went wrong and I got the following error message:

As you can see my old photo was still there and the error message read “Photo upload failed. Please try again in a few minutes.”

I then waited and tried again, but with the same result. I finaly gave up.

But suddenly I saw the following on our blog front-page on Technorati:

Hey! This is the new picture – not the old one. But how? Didn’t the error message just tell me otherwise?

In their eager to display error messages in every problematic situation Technorati might have overdone it a bit ;)

Technorati Tags: technorati, error messages, error message, usability, profile, photo, upload

This entry was posted by Thomas Watson Steen on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 11:46 (GMT-1) and is filed under Errors, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.