Hi Mark, If there can be an error we need to be prepared to deal with it. For designing a proper solution I need some more information. Which kinds of errors can be produced and at which point of the workflow? Is there a way to solve them without user intervention? Is there some information we can provide to help the user to solve them? Will retrying later be a likely way to solve the issue? clicking on the "disable/enable" button and the action not taking effect because the place where we store such info fails to do so (I don't know if that is an external server). For this kind of error, we can just inform using a standard MediaWiki notification bubble with some message along the lines of "It was not possible to disable Media Viewer due to some technical difficulties. Please try again later." and keep the panel opened so that the user can try again. In any case, we should not show the confirmation popup if the action had no effect. In any case, I'm making here some assumptions since I don't know the internals of the process. Pau On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:46 PM, Mark Holmquist <mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org> wrote: -- Pau Giner Interaction Designer Wikimedia Foundation

I think there are four groups of errors, based on what the user can do about it: 1. intermittent errors in the AJAX request (network errors, server being busy) 2. bugs 3. session timeout - user needs to log in again 4. localstorage errors (strict security settings or quota exceeded, or even no localstorage support at all) 1. and 2. could be covered by something like "there was an error, please retry and report it if it persists". 3. is very rare and will cease to be at the next page load so it's probably OK to ignore it. I'm not sure about 4 - that's something that needs user intervention, and a source of complaints (there have been reports that it is impossible for anons to disable Media Viewer, which I suppose is caused by this). Localstorage settings are a poweruser feature though, not sure how to communicate about them.

Thank you all for bringing this up! For now, my recommendation would be to provide a way to report errors, and include a link to our FAQ, where we could recommend actions the user could take about them. Pau, could you please investigate a design solution for reporting such errors? It seems reasonable to let people know when something goes wrong, and what they can do about it. Thanks, Fabrice On Oct 16, 2014, at 8:38 AM, Ward Cunningham <ward(a)c2.com> wrote: On Oct 16, 2014, at 8:37 AM, Gergo Tisza <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: On Oct 16, 2014, at 8:23 AM, Mark Holmquist <mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org> wrote: _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)

Would it be possible to make the standard notification bubbles to be visible while Media Viewer is open (e.g., moving or adjusting the style of the .mw-notification-area element)? I think it is better to reuse our standard methods of communication when possible. FYI, I created this ticket for this issue, so we can update it together: I added an initial mockup and notes. Regarding where to direct users to I would not just redirect them to the FAQ unless there is a specific question about the current issue (in which case we should link to that section). In general, we may want to link to a place where users can report their issues (talk page ? phabricator?) Pau -- Pau Giner Interaction Designer Wikimedia Foundation