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Greater or equal
Message
From
07/10/2014 10:13:14
 
 
To
07/10/2014 10:03:53
Mike Yearwood
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
General information
Forum:
Business
Category:
Technical writing
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
01608877
Message ID:
01608918
Views:
33
>>>>Hi everybody,
>>>>
>>>>I have the following error message text:
>>>>
>>>>"Credit Limit must be a number greater or equal than 0" (this error message is shown in angularJs web form).
>>>>
>>>>I am a bit concerned about than 0 part. If there would not be 'equal' part, then 'than' sounds OK. But with added 'equal' I am not exactly sure about this error message.
>>>>
>>>>Can you please tell me if this is OK and if not, how it should be formulated?
>>>>
>>>>Thanks in advance.
>>>
>>>You're communicating with humans, not programmers.
>>>What you really want to say to a human is that the credit limit can't be negative.
>>>So why not just say:
>>>
>>>"The credit limit can't be negative"
>>
>>Good point. I guess this is the best.
>
>I disagree. Some humans do not know what negative means and error messages should be more specific, not more generic.

This message will only appear if someone puts a minus sign in front of the value in question.
To be really specific, the message could say "Minus signs are not allowed" but that sounds a bit clunky to me.

It's anyone's guess whether the user will or will not know what a specific word means, but my bet would be that it's more likely that the average human (not programmer) will know what "negative" means than what >= 0 means.
Anyone who does not go overboard- deserves to.
Malcolm Forbes, Sr.
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