pf » Error Jargon

January 09, 2006

Error Jargon

While working today I had to write an error message that a user would see if their session had timed out. I was tempted to write something like:

Sorry your session has expired please login again.

But I quickly realized that the average user has no idea what a session is referring to, and why it has expired. In some cases the user may think that their account has expired. Users may also not understand what you mean by a timeout - that's where you send the bad kids?

Us web developers often throw technical jargon into our web applications without much thought. I've done it, and I've seen lots of messages that only a web developer would understand out there.

Lets try to be better about this, ok?

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Comments

On 01/09/2006 at 2:20:05 PM MST Will Belden wrote:

Pete,

How about a suggestion for a better message for the same kind of thing?

- Will Belden http://www.belden.net http://www.SmartUpdates.net

On 01/09/2006 at 2:40:00 PM MST Pete Freitag wrote:

It would really depend on the auidance, but perhaps something like this:

Please login to your account again. We had to log you out after a period of inactivity.

On 01/09/2006 at 2:41:07 PM MST Pete Freitag wrote:

Or something less formal:

We thought you left so we logged you out. Please login again.

On 01/09/2006 at 5:06:12 PM MST BullMann wrote:

can you shed some light on - how to call mx webservice from CF5 ?. BTW, Its been a while you posted anything on webservices... thanks

On 01/10/2006 at 4:19:01 AM MST bob wrote:

how about putting a positive security spin on it, like "to make sure that no-one else can get into your account while you're away from your computer, we've automatically logged you out."

On 01/10/2006 at 8:11:51 AM MST Pete Freitag wrote:

I like that one bob...

BullMann - there are a few articles on consuming web services in CF 5 out there. You might also try playing with Apache Axis - the java api that CFMX uses for web services.