© 2025 Peter N.M. Hanstein
Norway is digital to a fault. This is why attempting to buy a ticket for bus travel can reveal a host of user experience (UX) failures.
Most days, I either have to walk a half-hour to my main client’s office, or work from home. But sometimes, I need to go to my employer’s offices. On those days, I take the bus for an easy 20-minute journey.
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This week, some meetings and an internal session ux design I was scheduled at my employer’s site, so after my usual morning routine of making coffee, feeding the cat, and checking overnight mail and news, I got ready to head to the office.
On the way out the door, I opened the ticket app from our local bus company Skyes on my Android phone, selected the single ticket option, selected Vips as the payment method as usual and cleared the authentication steps before locking the phone and putting it away.
Some unrelated alert buzzed on the phone and I unlocked it again, only to see that the payment had failed. Unknown error Message.
I was on my way out the door when the transaction started, so I suspected that perhaps the network change from my home WiFi to Telia 5G had somehow disrupted connectivity. This would be a rare occurrence, but Is happened.
So I tried to complete the transaction again, but got the same result. After a few more attempts, the bus turned and I was on my way.
So yes, I technically traveled on the bus without paying. This means that theoretically I owe Skies something like NOK 41.32 and would be at risk of a fine of something like NOK 950 if caught by ticket inspectors without proof of payment.
However, no inspector came, so my day was spent away from the office with some client work, meetings and finally the main item of the day, which was a short, concise, intense but quite interesting and inspiring session on UX design work.
The UX session ended, and we engaged in some socializing over pizza and refreshments.
Then, naturally, it was time for my bus journey back home. Once again I tried to purchase a single ride ticket through the app, but I got the same error.
Unknown error,
And there’s no way to get any details about what the actual error was.
So I once again boarded the bus without completing the transaction, so my debt to Skyes would now have almost doubled, and I again risked a fine when the inspectors arrived.
My main suspect for the source of the failure at this point was the Vipps app.
For context, the Vips smartphone app is very close to the default payment method in Norway, even more so for transactions involving online payments. Any type of failure or issue involving Vipps service is almost guaranteed to make headlines with strongly worded articles and aggressively ugly comment threads.
So when I got back home, I opened the Vips app on my phone, and found that instead of its usual transactional UI I was presented with a question asking if I was a politically exposed person, with options to answer basically, “Yes,i was the first one“, And “No,
But there is no way to bypass the prompt Make payments or other transactions,
The answer was obvious, but once I entered the answer, I was taken to a screen with only one option, updatePossibly to update the app to a newer version.
is pushing update The button took me and my Android phone play store Entry for Vipps app, which offered the option open App or it needs to be installed on your Android tablet in addition to your phone.
choose to open The app just took me back to the same single-option update The screen, in perfect circular motion.
So after failing to find any other option, I ended up uninstallThen to re-install Vips App.
Of course this involves a completely new setup. fortunately (or perhaps This is a matter of concern From a privacy perspective), the app managed to link itself to my main bank account, inferred from my National ID number, which is required information in the sign-up process.
so UX fail #1 This was the case in the Skies app, where the developers apparently trusted the Vips app to either never fail or at least fail in some obvious way, so it was not deemed necessary to display any information from Vips.
UX fail #2 That will likely go to the developers of the Vipps app, who assumed that users would only interact directly with their system, never through a third-party app that uses Vipps as a payment backend. Or perhaps the Skys developers screwed up their app’s API interaction with the Vips app, possibly hooking into the app when they actually Needed Instead Wips is talking to the backend.
At the end, UX fail #3 Obviously that goes to the Vips team, who failed to test the sequence of events they set out to do. update Button in the app. whoever they are Did The test obviously didn’t include any recent Android phones from those too-big-to-fail Koreans.
While an internet greybeard like me was able to figure out that the app needed to deal with some minor violence, I can only imagine the complete confusion it would cause. (internet) digital native This is exactly what a senior citizen of the same age as me would have experienced when I came across this exact scenario.
Bonus Track: Adobe Does This Too with AI
The developers I’ve scolded for not doing their job properly UX-wise may find some solace in knowing that they are not alone in producing UX failures.
Returning readers will know about The Book of PF, Fourth Edition Is coming soon (Too Here), and we’ve reached the point where the thing is in the final stages of certification.
For reasons probably best explained by the publishers’ production team, the application we use for final proofing and associated annotations is from Adobe nutA few years ago I decided that macOS was so BSDish that I would use it a lot, so installing a no-direct cost version of the app on a system within reach was a fairly painless exercise, As was the initial proofing round and the intermediate round,
Then when the PDF came in for the final proofing cycle, and I loaded the PDF of about two hundred and fifty pages, I discovered that Acrobat had AI assistant Component.
When the progress indicator showed that the file was ready to be displayed for me final certification round, acrobat AI assistant oh-so helpfully inspired me
It looks like a long document. Would you like to see a summary instead?
Granted, my use case here is probably not specific to any user. gratis Version of Acrobat.
But I’ll give the award to Adobe UX Fail #4 Bonus prize here, a UX fails because AIWhat a complete failure to consider is that some people actually create long documents and like to see them through.
Ride a bus and fail (at least) 3x the UX © 2025 Peter NM Hanstein (Published 2025-11-28)
You may also be interested in reading selected excerpts That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Brief Reading List (Too Here,
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