{"id":26827,"date":"2019-10-10T16:42:23","date_gmt":"2019-10-10T20:42:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=26827"},"modified":"2019-10-18T14:16:11","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T18:16:11","slug":"silent-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/10\/silent-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"Silent Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I continue to hold that one of the worst aspects of today’s Apple is their strident antipathy toward error messages. Silent failure is so much worse than an error message, but that’s the way Apple rolls.<\/p>\n

I don’t know when it started (maybe with the update to 13.1.2? maybe one of the other 13.1.x updates?) but for a week or so I’ve been unable to buy new apps on my iPad. I hit the buy button, confirm with top button, Face ID authenticates me, it spins for a bit — then, nothing.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

I don’t mind that my card needed to be verified. Security is good. But why in the world wasn’t I told that the reason why I couldn’t purchase anything is that my card needed to be verified?<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Even a bad error message, something that just says “An Error Occurred” with no indication of what the error was, is better than silent failure. Silent failure is the UI equivalent of gaslighting — it makes you feel like you’re going crazy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Todd Heberlein<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Seriously. In the age of search engines, being able enter error message details into a search field, even if the messages seem cryptic to the typical user, will often lead the user to a simple, step-by-step solution to their problem.<\/p>\n

But you need the message to start the search<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Dan Crosby<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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My guess: software quality is now metric-driven, so their efforts are to driving down (or up) numbers they can track: crashes, dialogs displayed, etc. Silent errors don’t show up in metrics, so nobody is rewarded for either fixing or revealing them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Andy Newman<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I wonder how much this gives Apple a false sense that their software is performing better than it actually is, simply because so many issues can’t always be accurately described or fixed by the average user. Many just give up.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n