How many times you have seen an error message window to pop-up in an application giving you a meaningless error message and all you can do is to press “Ok” or “Cancel” without any idea where the error message was related to. At best the error message gives you some hint what was wrong and you may get back on track with the application. However once you close the pop-up, you no longer have the details of the error message to help you with fixing the problem. Do the applications you yourself have developed behave this way?

Well, things don’t have to be this way? On the contrary, you as a developer should design applications so that you never let your users to find  themselves in situations like this. It’s not only a benefit of the user, but also a benefit of you as a developer. Once your applications works fluently and gives your users intuitive feedback, you need to spend much less time for the user support and you’ll have much more time for your most important tasks.

One way to increase the usability of your application is to avoid pop-up windows altogether and instead display contextual error-messages in-place as close to the actual point-of-problem as possible. For example, when you have a user editable string control, your application should display the error message right next to the string control and instruct the user right away fix the problem occurred.

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