Aaron's website

Ways UIs can Fail Us

A very incomplete list.

• Broken UI
  • Silently broken search functionality. In 2024-06 the website for hotels in downtown Bar Harbour, Maine had a basic feature to search for hotels with availability on the dates you wanted to stay. Except, the search would always incorrectly return 0 results. If you instead went to a different UI surface to display a grid of hotels and the days they had availability, it showed several results. These results were "real" as far as I could tell: You could add them to a cart. I did not report the bug.
• Stale info
  • As of 2024-06-06, the National Park Service website said that Crane Flat Campground was closed, but the booking website recreation.gov said it had recently re-opened. I did not report the discrepancy. (Although I sometimes do report this sort of thing.)
• Stale state
  • "Just refresh/retry." An iOS app required me to create an account before accessing functionality. I created an account, then the app threw a "not authorized" exception when I tried to access the functionality. Fortunately, I knew to just wait a moment and then try to access the functionality again.
• Broken promise
  • 5 minutes before it was supposed to happen, on 2024-06-07 at 6:55am, a recreation.gov booking page appeared to have released campsites for bookings beginning Friday 2024-06-21; those campsites were marked available for 2024-06-21 and Not Released for all later dates. I thought this may have been a confusing UI. But now I think they simply did the release earlier than 7am, when they said they would. Maybe they would have blocked you from adding them to your cart until 7am, idk. I did not report the bug.
  • recreation.gov may not get in trouble for releasing campsites early, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics investigated after releasing economic data 30 minutes early