Crash dialog, Gnome bug 127043 [was Re: [Usability] Some interesting user feedback]

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, Bryan W Clark wrote:

<snip> lots of suggestions </snip>

> Not that I would want to copy this, perhaps embrace and extend...
> http://www.windows-help.net/windows98/img/ie-error-tool.gif
>
> I like how they simply say:
> 	"There was an error, they are sorry"
> 	"Please tell us about it"
>
> Then 2 options: ( with ability to restart app )
> 	"Don't send report / Send report"

I really like how succint this is, the other suggested wordings have been
quite verbose.  In fact the two sentences provided by Bryan would be even
better.

I hate reading "Solution messages" ;) at the best of times (attention span
of a goldfish), and a crash has got to be the worst of times so brevity is
essential.  Sorrys and excessive grovelling are just an annoying reminder
of to the user of how badly the software has screwed up.  Note the wording
says "sorry for the inconvenience" and does no additional grovelling.

> > Another thing that could be cool would be a "check for a new version"
> > button (with associated explanatory text) that would run red-carpet /
> > apt-get / rhn / whatever for you to see if there was a new version of
> > the package. (libgnomeui would just have stubs, which the various
> > packagers could then plug their systems into.)

I'm inclined to believe that Bug-Buddy (or whatever) should have a
boilerplate text recommending an upgrade to the newest stable version
rather than unecessarily cluttering the error dialog.

The only thing I can think of that would make this any better would be
trying to cooperate with KDE so that users in mixed enviroments could get
a fairly similar and consistant error message from both Gnome and KDE.

So I heartily agree with Bryans sentiment to 'embrace and improve' and
encourage people to keep the message as brief as possible.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

PS I had a quick rummage through bugzilla but didn't see any bug reports
that seemed to apply directly to the crash dialog we are
discussing so I opened a new report
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127043