Peter N. M. Hansteen 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...
First seen: 2025-12-02 06:53
Last seen: 2025-12-02 06:53