Marceau, Fisler and Krishnamurthi, "On novices' interactions with error messages"

https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mfk-mind-lang-novice-inter-error-msg

A rare empirical study that I found extremely useful.

Outside of a univ course, my lessons are slightly different from the paper's:

• Maintain a map of error messages for a project, use this to minimize the vocabulary of error messages.
• Be enigmatic rather than risk misleading.
• Make affordances beyond error messages optional. Color-coding has a cost. Not highlighting may be better.

This post is part of my Freewheeling Apps Devlog.

Comments gratefully appreciated. Please send them to me by any method of your choice and I'll include them here.