Status messages displayed to the user #290
Comments
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Writing the error messages is going to have to be a team effort. No single one of us could likely write them to be clear or brief enough. Lots of resources on the UX Wiki's Resources section. Google Material's writing guide (at the aforelinked page), imho is the best—but I highly recommend folks use some learning time to read through the USDS Plain Language guide (left nav needed to advance through pages—shitty UI). SO EXCITED TO SEE THE PROGRESS! @creviera could you maybe create in the FPF GDocs, a spreadsheet for keeping all the above stuff? What the message is, what the action is that prompted it, where the message goes, seem like a good 4 columns to begin with. w00t! |
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Also: Active voice is VERY important for usability, and something I often see absent in messaging. |
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Spreadsheet with messaging content: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JTZ6XTSmtMmoiXEcgnxnHtQczAnjLuRdajbYQxpO2-U/edit?usp=sharing Updated prototype showing "Reply" errors and an Activity Log (not in scope for Beta), here: https://invis.io/XDRB535NR9Z#/355404383_Reply_-_Composing Will update shortly, with a Beta stand-in for the Activity log (current IxD depends upon it). |
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As mentioned, we are now using https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JTZ6XTSmtMmoiXEcgnxnHtQczAnjLuRdajbYQxpO2-U/edit#gid=0 as a message inventory (needs to be updated, again); we're also tracking responsiveness of the app in freedomofpress/securedrop-ux#110 which we'll be discussing in more detail next week. Closing this issue as it is a bit outdated at this point. |
Description
This issue gives us a place to track the status messages we currently display to the user. Here we should decide which messages are helpful to display and how to word them.
More info
Once changes in https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop-client/tree/issue-279-refreshing are merged, error messages will show up in the center of the status bar, and they will be clipped when necessary in order to remain one-line. Error messages will appear next to activity messages, which normally say something like
Last Refresh: just now.Right now the goal is to keep messages short and concise (for tips on useful error messaging, see https://uxplanet.org/how-to-write-good-error-messages-858e4551cd4). @ninvizz any other good resources?
We may want to eventually use a combination of
...and hover popups to show the rest of the message. Also some languages with longer words will be clipped more often and that's not a good user experience.Current error messages
When a user cannot be authenticated:
When a user needs to login to perform the specified action:
When a timeout occurs while waiting for a response from the server (e.g. during refresh, login):
When an API sync for a star/unstar update fails to successfully update the source:
When there is a failure to delete source:
When delete operation times out:
Current activity messages
Default message that will only disappear when a new activity message temporarily replaces it:
When a user clicks download:
When attempt to decrypt a file fails during file download action:
When connection times out during a file download:
When the file is downloaded:
When file cannot be downloaded for some reason:
Some of these messages clearly need to be moved to the error status section. This is just the current state.
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