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Pandora (followup) Neat error messaging

22^nd of October 2005

Yes, Pandora is great but it too can make mistakes. All software make mistakes. When that happens it's important that you deal with the mistake/error in a constructive manner. Firstly you have to have your debugging tools set up to alert the developer(s) of the error with full details and correct integrity and secondly you need to report back to the innocent user a message (and in some cases a good plan of action for the user to take).

Pandora seemed to be struggling today when I started it and since I haven't seen that before I took a screenshot of the error message and here I write about it. What's good about this error message?

• it's honest ("We're having unexpected technical difficulties")
• it's informative with a twist (they're informing the user about what they're doing about it with a comical twist "scrambling to fix things")
• it's instructive ("Please try again later")

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