1.

One day, as I was reading an essay on Medium, I saw an automatically inserted subscribe block:

But as I was exactly on top of it, a new thing popped in my view, an interruption on top of interruption, both saying the exact same thing:

2.

For a while now, whenever I try to follow a link to a site that no longer exists, Chrome shows a strange “This site doesn’t support a secure connection” flyout, just before hiding it itself, and then following it by a generic error page:

This feels truly eerie: either a bug where the flyout gets triggered too soon without having all the information, or the flyout is trying to warn you about Chrome’s very own internal page.

3.

Just this week, after already having been in Taiwan for five days, and after having used Apple Pay to pay for public many times on each of these days, Apple Maps helpfully told me that I can… use Apple Pay to pay for public transit:

4.

Some months ago, after finalizing my car reservation and moving my attention elsewhere, an automatic “keep the session warm or lose it” window appeared, suggesting my reservation might actually “expire”:

5.

Downloading is possible on YouTube Premium and actually helpful, allowing you to load up some videos ahead of a long flight. There even exists a section where it suggests some things to download.

However, download suggestions include member-only videos, and whenever you try to grab one of those, you get this result – a pretty poor “Video wasn’t downloaded” message:

6.

When I recently opened a dispute on PayPal for a keyboard I never received, at the end of the process, I saw these three screens in succession:

In effect the screens said, in order: we closed the case and decided in your favour, you haven’t finished filing the case, the case is open and we’ll update you.

7.

I feel uneasy bundling all these “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” examples, because they’re not all the same.

Examples #1–3 from Medium, Chrome, and Apple Maps are frustrating and somewhat embarrassing, outbursts from badly-behaving software that doesn’t know that it’s not okay to throw pop-ups at the screen whenever you feel like it. I particularly dislike announcements of features that the user has already been using since they feel condescending to me, but I don’t want to assume it’ll be the same for everyone else.

Examples #4–6, however, are more insidious. Whether they happen because of plain old carelessness, or lack of imagination, or Conway’s Law – different teams not talking to each other – they can lead to people jumping to wrong conclusions or building entirely wrong mental models. Is my reservation truly done, or have I not actually finalized it? Is it possible to download member-only content, except I need to do something special to set it up? What is the status of my PayPal dispute?

The answers in this case: yes + no + the first screen was the one telling the truth. But each answer required extra effort for me to figure out, and that effort would be avoided if only someone tested the flows better.