An Assistive Tool to Improve Usability of Error Dialogs

Improperly designed error and exception dialogs can be confusing to the user, and can severely degrade productivity. Existing work on designing error dialogs largely focuses on providing guidelines for general design and documentation. We designed and implemented an Error Dialog Toolbox (EDT) to transform these guidelines into practical use, and to standardize the error dialogs to help developers create error messages quickly and effectively. EDT gathers answers to a set of pre-designed questions, helps the developer write more helpful error messages, and gives them a template for error dialogs that can be used in any application. The current version focuses on error and exception categories of dialog boxes. We present an evaluation study of EDT to demonstrate its effectiveness.