Error Messages, Dialog Boxes, and Trained Monkeys

“How do I make this error message go away? It appears every time I start the computer.”

“What does this error message say?”

“It says, ‘Updates are ready to install.’ I’ve just been clicking the X to make it go away, but it’s really annoying.”

I hear things like the above in the office all the time. I have always wondered why what is patently obvious is lost on the computer users. I catch myself half jokingly refer to it as either a “keyboard to chair interface” problem, or an ID ten T error.

Jeff, over at Coding Horror says it is because they have been trained to just close the dialog box so they can get their work done.

It’s like giving shocks or food pellets to monkeys when they press buttons — primates very quickly learn what gives them the good stuff and avoids the bad.

We get dialogs, prompts, and javascript errors, and users have been trained to just close the things. Eric Lippert is quoted as saying:

It’s not that users are morons or that they “forget” to think. It’s that users are trained to not think.

He goes on to say that most dialog boxes give contextual data but most users only see them as saying:

Most of the time the best thing the user can do is just close the stupid dialog boxes that pop up and get on with their work. When they come across a real problem, one that just clicking the button does not fix, then they holler for tech support, and I get frustrated because they did not read the ‘error message’. But the real problem is the ‘training’ program.

HatTip: AtomSmasher.org for the error message generator.