Story: I want to add a value to a URL-restricted property
What happens already
If the URL I type is not well formed according to the check (e.g. heise.de is not well formed) I get an error message.
It is good, usability-wise, that the problem is made clear by the color change to orange and the popup. However, the message does not help the user to recover from the error, since it is very generic. (there is details, which in this case is more specific, but it may not be used)
What should happen
(in order of assumed workload and gain from lower to higher)
- The error should point out the problem right away and in user-understandable language: "The value ›heise.de‹ does not look like a URL for our check, so it could not be saved."
- Assuming that there is a group catching Regex, it makes sense to check what exactly failed: "We could not save this, since heise.de does not look like a URL for our check: the protocol (like http://) is missing. Please correct the URL and try again"
- We may also tentatively just accept a value (in this case, heise.de works in any browser, including lynx) and flag is somehow as "possibly incomplete" so the user could continue and return later or allow someone else to fix it.
Usability Guidelines: User Control and Freedom, Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Related: T138312