The page is blank: Why users can’t describe your bugs

Last week my vehicle started making a sound when I accelerated. Nothing was broken enough to stop using it, but it was clearly not normal. So I went to the service center.

The mechanic asked what the problem was. I said there’s some sound.
He asked, “What kind of sound?”

I had no answer.

Not because I didn’t want to explain it. Not because I hadn’t paid attention. I had already told him everything I knew. It happens after acceleration. It comes from this side. Beyond that, I genuinely didn’t know how to describe the sound itself.

That moment felt very familiar.

This is exactly how users report bugs

When users say things like:

• “Something feels off”
• “It’s slow sometimes”
• “It behaves weirdly after I click this”

Teams often react with frustration. The report is treated as low quality. Someone says, “This isn’t actionable.”

But what’s actually happening is simpler: the user has reached the limit of what they can observe.

Users don’t experience your system the way you do. They don’t see logs, states, transitions, or failures. They experience outcomes. Once they describe that outcome, there’s nothing more left for them to add.

The page is blank because it contains nothing else.

Asking for “more details” usually doesn’t help

The mechanic asking “what kind of sound?” wasn’t wrong. It’s a natural question if you understand vehicles. From my side, it was useless. I didn’t have that vocabulary.

This is what happens when teams keep asking:

• “Can you explain it better?”
• “What exactly is happening?”
• “What kind of error is it?”

The user repeats the same thing again, just with different words. No new signal is created. Everyone feels stuck.

At that point, the problem is no longer communication. It’s a process.

What the service center did right

The mechanic didn’t keep pushing me to explain better. He repeated what I said to make sure he understood the constraints. Then he tried a few concrete options to narrow it down. When that still wasn’t enough, he took the information to his senior.

The senior didn’t complain about missing details. He asked a few focused questions, checked the vehicle himself, and diagnosed the issue.

From entry to fix, it took about ten minutes.

Not because the problem was trivial. Because their process didn’t depend on the customer being precise.

Where product teams usually fail

In software teams, vague bug reports often block progress. Support waits for clarity. QA waits for better steps. Engineering waits for something “actionable”.

What the service center assumed instead was this: incomplete information is normal, and diagnosis belongs to the team.

They didn’t need me to describe the sound correctly. They needed a system that could work with partial input and still move forward.

Most teams don’t have that.

What to change (practically)

If vague bug reports keep blocking your team, don’t fix the users. Fix how your team handles first contact.

A few concrete shifts that actually help:

• Stop asking open-ended questions early.
  “What exactly happened?” rarely adds signal. Ask questions that narrow scope instead: after which action, how often, did it work before.
• Reflect before you proceed with fixing.
  Repeat back what you’ve understood in one line. It aligns context and often surfaces corrections without demanding more detail.
• Move investigation left.
  If the report is unclear, someone should still try to reproduce it immediately. Waiting for “better info” is usually just delay.
• Design prompts for recognition, not explanation.
  Dropdowns, examples, checkboxes, or “did it look like this?” style prompts work better than free-text boxes.
• Accept escalation with partial information.
  If your process requires a perfectly written report before engineering looks at it, the process is the bottleneck.

None of this requires better users.
It requires teams to accept that ambiguity is normal and design around it.

To wrap up

Users don’t describe bugs poorly. They describe them as good as they can.

If your team can’t move forward from that point, the issue isn’t communication quality. It’s that your diagnostic process assumes precision that users will never have.

If the page is blank, your job is to know what to do next.