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
• Unclear semantics
  • One of these means that the camera was set to apply noise reduction, and you haven't changed that during development. The other means that any noise reduction has been disabled. Can you tell which is which? (There is a language to the design, but it takes a while to figure it out. This is Nikon's NX Studio desktop app.)
    • Exhibit A:
    • Exhibit B: