I have experienced this in person with a developer who was failing to debug something. An error message was popping up on screen and he was reflexively clicking it away faster than anybody could read it. Even after being told “an error message is popping up, don’t dismiss it”, even after being told “[do the thing that triggers the bug] and then completely stop without doing anything else”, and a whole bunch of other ways of phrasing it, he was unable to understand that the error message contained useful information that we needed to see. I’m not even sure he was consciously aware it existed or that he was doing it. After many failed attempts at getting him to stop I literally had to take the mouse away from him and do it myself. I was shocked that apparently nothing anybody could say would stop him from dismissing the error message without even looking at it.
Developers should adapt to human behavior not laugh at users for using their precious thing wrong. It's not precious to the user. A probably misremembered quote from Joel Spolsky is users don't love your software, they tolerate your software because it's the least annoying obstacle in the way of doing what they want to do.
I think this comes from the same problem as notifications on iPhones: if you dismiss them accidentally then it is very difficult to find out what it was.
It is missing the equivalent of the "history" in e.g. browsers and YouTube.
If a user dismisses an alertbox on desktop, why isn't there an history menu item that shows the previous 100 alert messages?
That may be an issue for messages from people but almost anything that pops up because the computer wants to tell you is useless and certainly doesn't need to be findable later. If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do. Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code but we think users are somehow less deserving of respect and ready to drop everything to deal with some stupid notification telling them they did it wrong or the software is broken like a crying child demanding his mother knows that he hurt his finger.
Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful. It is often easier to mindlessly trial-and-error your way around obstacles than waste your attention on them.
It is missing the equivalent of the "history" in e.g. browsers and YouTube.
If a user dismisses an alertbox on desktop, why isn't there an history menu item that shows the previous 100 alert messages?
https://www.lifewire.com/iphone-notification-history-1189516...
Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful. It is often easier to mindlessly trial-and-error your way around obstacles than waste your attention on them.