Don't Break my Illusion 🥽🔦

A professionally dressed character, depicted walking on a city sidewalk, looking down intently at a smartphone.

Generated by DALL.E

Experiencing a glitch that reveals an app's inner workings can be jarring.

For example, my Pixel phone's Google Photos app recently crashed, unexpectedly displaying a fallback interface reminiscent of Google BigQuery or Spanner. This brief, unrepeatable glitch momentarily made me question Google Photos' reliability in preserving my cherished memories, despite my trust in the app.

A similar glitch occurred with the "Google Home" Nest Doorbell's Live view. If I recall correctly, the app crashed and fell back to a Google Cloud Service (GCS) storage bucket view. 😢

These minor incidents underscore the importance of designing even for failure scenarios. A smooth and reassuring failure UI can help maintain user trust in the product.

Imagine finding out that your critical app is powered by a hamster on a wheel, or by Windows Vista 😳