[devoutsalsa]

My recent PayPal experience:

- try to pay for rental car in Mexico

- transaction declined

- get email saying account permanently locked

- get 2nd email w/ link to unblock (says click on unblock notification)

- no notification

- chatbot asks if I want help, redirects me to help page

- help page contains none of the following: unblock, unlock, locked

- chatbot asks if I still need help, says I have to call

- call link redirects to account home page

[88913527]

Too much software development is getting divvied into different product development groups, and collectively it leads to the creation of flows through the product that make literally no sense, yet all of the smaller parts are seemingly fine, because nobody is the thinking of macro-level experience.

[boredtofears]

Yep, or it made sense at one time, until the <person> in <department> that was overseeing the holistic workflow left.

[Natsu]

I always love when it's clear that nobody has ever actually tried an option.

I once paid for internet via public wifi for a time. When my CC expired and it was time to renew... that was literally impossible because of how they redirected you to their paywall when you tried to visit anything else. Even if you were trying to go to the billing page to renew. So you literally couldn't pay them. Oh, and even if you had other internet access, that wouldn't work either, because the billing site was nowhere on the open internet, only via the municipal wifi.

Or there are similar loops in Amazon's help system, where they make it hard to get a human and it just loops you around the same sets of options when you tell it that it's not working right. So you have to swear at it to see if you can trigger the algorithms to detect frustration and get you out.

And those aren't even deliberate, like the dark patterns some places engage when you try to cancel a service.