I Tracked Every Bug Report for Six Months and Found a Pattern
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Every bug report, logged. Date, user, severity, what broke.
The pattern was not what I expected. Half of them were not bugs at all. They were confusion. People using the product in a way that made sense to them, hitting a wall, and reporting it as broken.
The code was fine. The explanation was not. The interface was not.
I spent the next month rewriting error messages and empty states instead of fixing code. Bug reports dropped by forty percent.
I had been treating symptoms as defects. Most of them were just misunderstandings I could have prevented with clearer words.
How many of your bug reports are actually confusion? And have you ever looked?
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Yes, and some of mine were not even the user's misunderstanding but the device's. One support request said Google sign in was broken on an iPhone. The cause was the phone's clock: its time zone was set wrong while the clock showed local time, so it ran nine hours ahead and every fresh sign in token looked expired. Our backend was never even reached. The fix was words, like yours: that specific error now gets its own message telling the user to set the date and time automatically, instead of a generic failure. A clear error message is cheaper than any patch.