aethelyon

A big thing for the past few years has been to simplify UI messaging as much as possible as to not cause any unnecessary confusion for users. It’s a great idea without a doubt, and for a lot of users, it makes using software a lot more comfortable. There are two places where it goes wrong though: error messaging and advanced tasks. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not campaigning for the return of cryptic developer error messages by any means. It would be nice however to have the option be taken to the log files in OSX/Vista without having to dig around manually. That’s an entirely different story though.

This entire post was prompted by a well-needed upgrade to this blog’s platform - Wordpress. I was still running 2.1 from last year and had noticed several RPC attacks (both failures and success — thankfully nothing too horrible happened). It was fairly smooth, other than the fact that the new dashboard didn’t work due to a plug-in conflict. No big deal, right? Wrong. The upgrade process somehow failed to migrate my existing categories. Between minor releases within a major release, one would assume that the database structure had not changed by that much, but apparently it had.

Though messaging should always be as comfortable and as plain as possible, it’s important to at least notify the user of what is going on or what is about to happen when they are about to perform an action that in any way ambiguous. In the cases that involve touching user or customer data, there should always be definite notification and prompting, especially when potential failure scenarios are known.

The real moral of the story here is that the navigation of this site is temporarily disabled until I take the time to fix was destroyed. The good news is that Wordpress now supports tags by default.