• Download free chapters on user testing from Steve’s book, Don’t Make Me Think.

If it’s worth saving to a logfile, it’s worth showing in the user interface. This is the paradox: if the information you’re logging is at all valuable, it deserves to be surfaced in the application itself, not buried in an anonymous logfile somewhere. Even if it’s just for administrators. Logfiles are all too often where useful data goes to die, alone, unloved and ignored.

This fails to take into consideration the two very distinct types of error messages that an application should have: administrator focused and user focused. Both of these error messages can be triggered by the same error condition. A problem occurs when you display administrator focused messages to the user: anyone that has come across largely meaningless error codes rather than a friendly human-readable language has experienced this less-than-valuable approach to logging.

Good error messages are essential to any application, and so are adminstrator focused messages, but let’s remember these are two very distinct features and need to be separated as necessary.