Norway is digital to a fault. That is why attempting to buy the ticket for a bus ride can reveal a cascade of user experience (UX) failures.
Most days, I either take a half hour stroll to get to my main customer's offices, or work from home. But occasionally, I need to visit my employer's offices. On those days, I take the bus for an easy 20-ish minutes ride.
Note: This piece is also available without trackers but classic formatting only here.
This week, a few meetings and an internal session on UX Design were scheduled at my employer's site, so after my usual morning routine of making coffee, feeding the cat and going over overnight mail and news, I got ready to head out to the office.
On the way out the door, I opened the tickets app from our local bus company Skyss on my Android phone, selected the single ticket option, went on as usual to select Vipps as the payment method and cleared the authentication steps before locking and putting the phone away.
Some unrelated alert buzzed on the phone and had me unlock it again, only to see that the payment had failed with an Unknown error message.
I had been on the way out the door when the transaction was initiated, so I suspected that perhaps the network change from my home WiFi to Telia 5G had somehow disrupted connectivity. That would be a rare occurence, but has happened.
So I tried completing the transaction again, only to get the same result. After a couple of more tries, the bus turned up and I got on my way.
So yes, I had technically taken a bus ride without paying. That means I in principle owe Skyss something like NOK 41.32 and would be at risk of getting fined something like NOK 950 if caught by the ticket inspectors without a proof of payment.
No inspectors turned up, however, so my day went on to some customer work performed remotely from the office, meetings and finally the main item of the day which was a short, compact, intensive but also quite interesting and inspiring session on UX design work.
The UX session concluded, and we went on to some socializing over pizza and refreshments.
Then, naturally, came the time for my bus ride back home. Once more I tried to purchase a single ride ticket via the app, only to be presented with the exact same error.
Unknown error.
And no way to get any details on what the actual error was.
So I got on the bus, again without completing a transaction, so my debt to Skyss would now have roughly doubled, and again I ran the risk of getting fined, should the inspectors turn up.
At this point my main suspect for the source of the failure was the Vipps app.
For context, the Vipps smartphone app is very close to being the default payment method in Norway, even more so for transactions involving online payments. Any failures or problems of any kind involving the Vipps service are almost guaranteed to make headlines with strongly worded articles and aggressively ugly comment threads.
So when I got back home, I opened the Vipps app on my phone, only to find that instead of its usual transaction UI I was presented with a question about whether I was a politically exposed person, with the options to answer basically, "Yes", "I was one previously", and "No".
But no way to bypass the prompt and perform a payment or other transaction.
The answer was obvious, but once I entered the answer, I was only taken to a screen with a single option, Update, presumably to update the app to a newer version.
Pushing the Update button took me and my Android phone to the Play store entry for the Vipps app, which offered the option to Open the app or to install it on my Android tablet in addition to my phone.
Choosing to to Open the app only took me back to the same single-option Update screen, in a perfectly circular progession.
So after failing to find any other option, I ended up uninstalling, then reinstalling the Vipps app.
Which of course involves a completely new setup. Fortunately (or perhaps worryingly from a privacy perspective), the app managed to connect itself to my main bank account, inferred from my national ID number, which is a required bit of information in the sign-up process.
So UX fail #1 was in the Skyss app, where the developers had apparently trusted the Vipps app to either never fail or at least fail in some obvious way, so displaying any information from Vipps was deemed not necessary.
UX fail #2 would likely go to the developers of the Vipps app, who seem to have assumed that users will only ever interact with their system directly, never through a third party app that uses Vipps as the payment back end. Or perhaps the Skyss developers screwed up their app's API interaction with the Vipps app, possibly hooking in the app when they really should have been talking to the Vipps back end instead.
Finally, UX fail #3 goes clearly to the Vipps team, who appear to have failed to test the sequence of events that will be triggered by their Update button in the app. Whatever they did test apparently did not involve any recent-ish Android phone from those too-big-to-fail Koreans.
While an Internet greybeard like myself was able to figure out that the app needed to be dealt some minor violence, I can only imagine the utter puzzlement any less (Internet) digital native senior citizen of actually pretty much the same age as myself would have experienced when met with this exact scenario.
For the developers I have just chided for not doing their jobs properly UX-wise, there might be some consolation in knowing that they are not alone in producing UX failures.
Returning readers will be aware that The Book of PF, 4th edition is coming soon (also here), and we have reached the time when the thing is in the last rounds of proofing.
For reasons probably best explained by the publishers' production team, the application we use for final proofing and related annotations is Adobe's Acrobat. A few years ago I decided that macOS is BSDish enough that I will use it quite a bit, so installing the no direct cost version of the app on a system within reach was a fairly painless excercise. As was the initial proofing round and an intermediate one.
Then when the PDF for the final proofing cycle arrived, and I loaded the two hundred and fifty-some pages PDF, I discovered that Acrobat had acquired an AI Assistant component.
When the progress indicator showed that the file was ready to display for my final proofing round, the Acrobat AI Assistant oh-so-helpfully prompted me with
This looks like a long document. Would you like to see a summary instead?
Granted, my use case here is possibly not the typical one for a user of the gratis version of Acrobat.
But I will award Adobe the UX fail #4 bonus prize here, a UX FAIL because AI, for failing utterly to consider that some people do, in fact, create long-ish documents and prefer to see them in the full.
A Bus Ride and the (At Least) 3x UX FAILs is © 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen (published 2025-11-28)
You might also be interested in reading selected pieces via That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List (also here).