How you fail determines how you succeed.

The cost of bad error messages.

This one is personal.

Over the holidays, a friend asked me to test their app and give feedback. I put on my average user hat, assumed no dev knowledge, and got to testing.

It didn’t take long to find issues.

Impressively, despite being a mobile app, the UI wasn’t very mobile-friendly. The layout was hard to read, and the user flow was the complete opposite of intuitive. But none of that was the real dealbreaker.

💥 The way the app handled errors was.

Most of the time, the app failed silently. I'd tap a button and... nothing. No message. No reaction. Just silence. It felt like the app was mocking me!

(Spoiler: later, running it in the emulator revealed that there were errors. The app just didn’t feel like telling me about them.)

When it did show an error, I wanted to smash my phone.
For example, during sign-up, I kept getting:

> Password format error.

That’s it. No hint. No rules. No guidance.
I spent several minutes trying to guess the password requirements, and at some point, even as a developer, I felt like giving up.


The Lesson
Clear, helpful error messages aren’t a nice-to-have.
They’re the difference between trusting a product... and ditching it.

When users don’t know what went wrong,
They can’t fix it.
They lose trust.
They look for alternatives.

Never assume the happy path. Things will go wrong.
You need a plan for when they do.
And that plan better include clear error messages!

Tips for better error handling:
✅ Don’t fail silently
✅ Tell users *what* went wrong
✅ Tell them *how to fix it*
✅ Use plain language.
- “Your password must contain at least 8 characters, including a capital letter, a number, and a symbol.” beats “Password format error.”

Next time you’re building an app, remember:
How you handle failure might determine how successful you’ll be at getting (and keeping) users.

Good error handling keeps your users and that friend who gave up his holiday to test your app(and who knows where you live) happy. 😄