Sunday, April 24, 2016

A Better Way to Present and Organize Error Messages in Your Delphi Applications

I'm in the process of totally redesigning an application I wrote 25 years ago. Today, I decided to look for a better way to present error messages to my customers. In the past I simply littered my code with bunch of technical speak ShowMessage('bla bla bla technical speak bla bla bla'); code fragments.

With the help of Google, it didn't take long to find out that the best approach is to use "Apologetic" language in error messages. This has a positive effect on your customers.

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/31359/should-error-messages-apologize
http://www.faqoverflow.com/ux/31359.html
http://freshsparks.com/user-experience-tips-best-error-messages/

I've never liked the idea that the standard ShowMessage gets positioned centered on the screen. I'd rather have a messaged display centered on the window where the error occurs. I also don't want my error messages scattered all over the place. So, I set out to do two things;
  1. Display error messages that are centered on the form where the error occurs
  2. Centralize all the error messages in one place
I created a separate unit for the express purpose of managing and displaying error messages:



This makes it very easy to keep track of all the error messages. It also lets me easily create similar but slightly different error messages for any given situation. I can also group related error messages by using a simple number scheme.

I'm a big fan of code completion Ctrl+Space. When I need to include an error message I simply type zmsg Ctrl+Space and up pops the code completion window with all the available error messages that I can choose from.

zmsg Code Completion

Enjoy,
Semper Fi
Gunny Mike

P.S. As far as using "we" inside the error messages. I asked my wife if she was okay with an application giving this type of feedback and she said it was fine with her.

No comments:

Post a Comment