HCI has an established history of criticising system
error messages and offering design guidelines for their
improvement. This paper continues this tradition by
exploring users’ attitudes and recovery strategies to web
error messages, examining the variety of messages
produced by popular web-sites and presenting design
guidelines for error messages. We believe this is the
first academic work on web error messages. We first
investigated users’ conceptions of error messages and
recovery strategies for a broad section of users (novice
to expert). This revealed that standard error messages
have a poor construction, which goes against most (if
not all) of the guidelines for writing effective error
messages. We then examined a range of popular
information and ecommerce sites from the US, Europe
and Australia and we offer a critique of the different
styles of dealing with errors. Finally we provide a
checklist of design considerations for use by web
designers and site managers that pay close attention to
good customer service and experience
