Below is a screenshot of a warning popping up in visual studio, complete with a ‘short’ url
What’s wrong with this helpful looking message?
- The link is inside a tooltip, which vanishes when you no longer mouse over the link. in other words, that hyperlink cannot be clicked at all #FAIL
- In a world full of link shorteners, http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=14202 is NOT a short link. #FAIL
- opening the warnings and clicking on ‘Show error Help’ does not redirect to this link. Instead, it brings you to help about that type of error. #FAIL
- Typing the handy 44 character short URL into my browser brings up a page with System.NET buried in collapsed content, linked by an anchor tag that doesn’t work. System.Net.IPAddress is not mentioned at all. #FAIL
- If you want to get picky, the text of the warning is presented in both single and double quotes. At the same time, and neither are appropriate here. #FAIL
This is the latest version of Visual Studio 2010, running on Windows 7. There are no legacy problems at work here. Five failures inside the design of a simple error message, inside one of the companies flagship products, no doubt designed and re-designed by a team of crack software developers and designers. I guess the ability to actually click on a link that appears on the screen is not a design priority for them. And as for what’s at the other end of the link, hey – that’s another team’s problem right?