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Greater or equal
Message
From
07/10/2014 15:08:25
 
 
To
07/10/2014 13:56:41
Mike Yearwood
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
General information
Forum:
Business
Category:
Technical writing
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
01608877
Message ID:
01608941
Views:
30
>>>>>>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.
>
>"Greater than or equal to zero" is simpler vocabulary than "negative"

If that works for you, Mike, enjoy it!
Anyone who does not go overboard- deserves to.
Malcolm Forbes, Sr.
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