Today I entered my email address incorrectly into Linkedin. I was shown the following message:
Having read some of Troy Hunts site have I been pwned, I see how many Linkedin accounts are listed (it’s a scary number). If I was looking at the story for that functionality from a security perspective I’d say that’s not a really good idea. If I was looking at it from a UX perspective I’d say it’s a nice and friendly way to let the user know exactly what’s wrong based on the blog post How to Write a Perfect Error Message.
Equally, I’ve filled in a page long form of different input fields, clicked submit and been told “Oops something went wrong”. Great. Thank you, that’s super helpful
How can we test error messages? How can we ensure that the user is getting enough helpful information but we’re not giving away the wrong kind of information? I’m interested in error messages of any kind (API, UI, etc) I’ve just used the login page as an example because it happened to me today