Do You Feel Dumb Yet?

Being developers we naturally overlook the fact that we speak jargon at work and in everyday life. More often than not we carry this '3lee7 5p3@k' on to the products we develop. Do you feel dumb seeing a message on your screen that you don't understand? Well, join the club because you surely aren't alone.

While working on "integration" with a shopping cart at bCentral today I ran into a funny error message:

The system is experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later.

If you need further assistance please contact us.

Invalid Parameters passed to stored procedure

Please go back and try again.

Really, people, all I did was feed it an incorrect product ID (on purpose!). Now, how much sense does the line about an invalid password to a stored procedure mean to you?

Here's another one. This time it came from ADO.NET:

Procedure GetMonthlyBlogPosts has no parameters and arguments were supplied. [... skipped ...]

Exception Details:

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Procedure GetMonthlyBlogPosts has no parameters and arguments were supplied.

I think I understand every word there but it still gives me a weird feelin'. "Procedure GetMonthlyBlogPosts has no parameters and arguments were supplied." Aaaah, the power of outsourcing. ;)

If you have had similar funny experiences, please share.

My point is: think about users first. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who can barely connect to the Internet and doesn't know anything about your line of work. Don't make them feel stupid.