If you program for a nontechnical audience, you find yourself at a high risk that users will not read your carefully worded and enlightening error messages, but just click on the first button available with a shrug of frustration.

So, I&#39;m wondering what good practices you can recommend to help users actually read your error message, instead of simply waiving it aside. Ideas I can think of would fall along the lines of:

 - Formatting of course help; maybe a simple, short message, with a &quot;learn more&quot; button that leads to the longer, more detailed error message
 - Have all error messages link to some section of the user guide (somewhat difficult to achieve)
 - Just don&#39;t issue error messages, simply refuse to perform the task (a somewhat &quot;Apple&quot; way of handling user input)

*Edit:* the audience I have in mind is a rather broad user base that doesn&#39;t use the software too often and is not captive (i.e., no in-house software or narrow community). A more generic form of this question was asked on [slashdot][1], so you may want to [check there][2] for some of the answers.

  [1]: http://slashdot.org/
  [2]: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/03/01/132219/How-Do-You-Get-Users-To-Read-Error-Messages

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How to get users to read error messages?