Plain English Error Messages

[Anonymous]

Fusion 360 is meant to be a more user friendly CAD software for the casual maker. Yet at the same time, the error messages are written in barely comprehensible technological gobbledegook. I've never looked at an error message in this program and then said to myself "ah, so that's what's wrong!", it's always been a case of reading the error message, being confused and googling my problem. If that's the case, why even have an error message? Just use some sort of error code.

See here:

What the heck does this actually mean?

My proposal is this: sweep through all of Fusion 360's error messages with a team of high schoolers. Any messages they don't understand get translated into layman's English. I'd much rather get a paragraph explaining what's wrong than a very compact 3 word message that makes no sense. Else, maybe you could link the error message to a help page instead where there's an explanation of what's happening.

tl;dr: Please make the error messages easier to understand! Plain English is greatly appreciated!

[k6ls]

yes!  something triggered an error flag/message.. what was it? IDK!

big thing for CAM, where you can't get a tool path, and you're pressed  to figure out why.

[Scoox]

Those pesky messages... I've seen far worse than this, but yeah from the user's perspective a mindless, meaningless message is as good as no message.

[Anonymous]

In addition it would help a lot when you get directet to to reference, that is missing.
Coming form Creo 3.0, they did a pretty amazing job there, telling you, where is missing what.
Would like to see something simlar in Fusion 360 😉

[diegogarciacacho]

I think this is a great idea to piggy back on this, in the menu section it has a preview of a feature for example a sweep example. My suggestion is that the error message illustrates in a graphical way the error that is being presented or the error it is referring to. This could help to visually repair o change what it is needed.

[DavePlant]

This would be great!

In general .. If the errors are not going to provide useful info, then don't bother to show them.

The messages would be better if they highlighted what the problem was.

Maybe:

Gave links to a list of the common causes for the problems.

Gave warnings that what your doing might not be what you intended to do. For example sketching off your sketch plane, sketching on a non-active component, etc.

A behind the scenes continuous fusion generated log file that could be accessed in case of trouble could be helpful trying to unwind some problems. 

[Anonymous]

Why not make it an community / crowd sourced effort: someone could write some notes to add to the error message.

[sellis]

Just add a link in the error message pointing to online help. The help file explanation can have a description, possible causes and fixes. I don't want to see huge error messages that I already understand. Quick access to possible solutions would be very convenient when something new comes along.

[mikesmsproductions]

Yes please! I get error messages all the time that I can't understand! It's simple: "If I didn't write the code, I probably won't understand the error message." It shouldn't take a doctorate in computer science and programming to understand a simple error message. I've gotten to the point where I just ignore the messages and try to figure out the problem with the brute force method - just try different things until it works.