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Guidelines for Specifying Alerts

Owner: Christian Jansen	Last Change: Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Goal of this document These guidelines shall help specification authors specifying Alerts.
Intended readership Specification authors, specification reviewers (Development , Quality Assurance , User Experience, Documentation)
Feedback: dev@specs.openoffice.org

Alerts (this incudes Warnings, Error Messages, Questions) are modal dialogs which contain the have to contain the following Elements:

An alert has to:

Clearly indicate that something has gone wrong
Describe the problem clearly and briefly.
Reason: Users want to quickly know what went wrong and how to fix it. Be brief.
Be polite and do not blame the users
Remember that people are upset when things are going wrong. Treat users with respect.
Reason: At this critical juncture you can make or break your future relationship with them.
Give advice on how to fix the problem
Use the language your Target group understands
Stay away from obscure error codes, abbreviations, technical jargon, or internal marketing terms unfamiliar to users. Use simple English.
Don’t make customers guess
Explicitly tell them how to prevent repeating an error.

Usage of Icons

Each Alert has to provide an icon. The icon gives information about the type of alert and its severity level of the alert.

Icon	Severity
	Question	Use this icon for alerts that ask a question. Use question as in normal flow of operation.
	Information	Use this icon for alerts that provide an information. Use this in normal flow of operation.
	Warning	Display this icon to notify that an unusual error occurred
	Critical	Display this icon to notify that an critical error occurred

Example:

The examples below shall give an idea of a warning which got improved from a poorly written alert to a good one:

Icon

Alert Text

OK?

Error saving the document ABC:
General Error.
General Input/Output error

No
Too technical. Language used is for Programmers but not for users. Wrong type of icon has been selected.

The document ABC could not be saved, because it is read-only.

No
Got improved, but provides no hint to get the problem solved.
Wrong type of icon has been selected; severity much too high.

The document ABC could not be saved, because it is read-only.

Try to remove the read-only property, or select “Save As...” from the “File” menu.

Yes
The text is well formulated, gives users a hint how to get this problem fixed. The severity, indicated by the icon, is correct.

Document History:

Revision	Change	Initials	Date
1	First draft created	CJ	July 23, 2005
2	Updated after inspection of p3386 team	CJ	October 5, 2005
3	Revised for OpenOffice.org usage	CJ	December 22, 2005