I have experienced this in person with a developer who was failing to debug something. An error message was popping up on screen and he was reflexively clicking it away faster than anybody could read it. Even after being told “an error message is popping up, don’t dismiss it”, even after being told “[do the thing that triggers the bug] and then completely stop without doing anything else”, and a whole bunch of other ways of phrasing it, he was unable to understand that the error message contained useful information that we needed to see. I’m not even sure he was consciously aware it existed or that he was doing it. After many failed attempts at getting him to stop I literally had to take the mouse away from him and do it myself. I was shocked that apparently nothing anybody could say would stop him from dismissing the error message without even looking at it.
I think this comes from the same problem as notifications on iPhones: if you dismiss them accidentally then it is very difficult to find out what it was.
It is missing the equivalent of the "history" in e.g. browsers and YouTube.
If a user dismisses an alertbox on desktop, why isn't there an history menu item that shows the previous 100 alert messages?
It's so weird to me that this kind of thing wasn't a day-1 kind of thing. Android's has loads of issues too[1], not least of which is that you need to manually enable it.
1: you can't get access to actions or details in the history (e.g. no long-press to change settings), nor does it show you ones you didn't dismiss by hand afaict (I've been having Discord notifications disappearing almost immediately after making a noise, but there's nothing in history even though I saw it for its whole half-second existence because it popped over my screen).
That may be an issue for messages from people but almost anything that pops up because the computer wants to tell you is useless and certainly doesn't need to be findable later. If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do. Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code but we think users are somehow less deserving of respect and ready to drop everything to deal with some stupid notification telling them they did it wrong or the software is broken like a crying child demanding his mother knows that he hurt his finger.
Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful. It is often easier to mindlessly trial-and-error your way around obstacles than waste your attention on them.
> Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code
I have no idea why you think this. The only reason I wouldn't like it is because I might be doing something that requires incorrect code as a placeholder, but if the modal didn't come back after being dismissed (and just sat in a history) I'd be pleased as punch. It's why I moved to rust - I wanted the compiler to stop me.
Not only do you think this, but you think it's somehow a sign of being egotistical and disrespectful that anyone would like to know when they're screwing up. Weird.
> If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do.
As I explained earlier, what we were actually trying to do was debug the problem, and reading the error message was a necessary part of that.
It’s weird you’ve cooked up this little fantasy that the error message was getting in the way when it was the most important thing in the whole process and that was the entire point of the anecdote.
> Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful.
Not when you’re trying to debug the problem the error message is telling you about!
Developers should adapt to human behavior not laugh at users for using their precious thing wrong. It's not precious to the user. A probably misremembered quote from Joel Spolsky is users don't love your software, they tolerate your software because it's the least annoying obstacle in the way of doing what they want to do.
The person I replied to described their frustration with a colleague dismissing an error message without reading, not a user. I'm not shaming users not providing clear actionable feedback with stack traces and reproduction steps. I've known fellow software engineers throw their hands up and ask for help because they're 'getting an error', that's what's annoying (because they should know better, ok what have you done before asking me, etc.) not users.
