Fixing civilisation,
one paper-cut at a time.
A single metric — lifetimes saved — for the tiny UI/UX failures that waste humanity's time at planetary scale. Each one is a back-of-a-napkin calculation. Each one is trivial to fix.
Chrome asks which email to save — right after you typed it
You reset your password from inside your email. Chrome offers to save it, with the username field blank — the one thing it just watched you type.
An hour of form-filling, gone on one accidental refresh
You fill a giant browser form — say the 8-page IRS W-8BEN-E. One ⌘R, back-swipe, or tab close, and it's all erased. No warning. No draft. Start over.
Cookie banners: click the same box on every site, forever
Shut up and give me the cookie. Whether you want to accept or reject, you're forced to decide again on every site you've ever visited — a choice a browser could make once.
Your cursor hits an invisible wall between mismatched monitors
A big monitor above, a laptop below. Push the pointer down from the side and it stops dead — you can only cross where the two screens happen to line up.
You can see the junk file in the Save dialog — you just can't delete it
The Save/Open dialog is a full file browser: navigate, search, New Folder. But it's crippled — no delete, no cleanup. Spot a file to bin while you're saving and you must remember to do it later in Finder. You won't.
The recording that deletes itself if you flinch
You dictate an idea. To keep it you must hit confirm — but the default, resting-finger action is discard, and the button moved since you last looked. One reflex and the only copy is gone.
You closed the lid; it says the server is broken
Sleep, a tunnel, a Wi-Fi blip — the connection drops and the app announces a Server Error and sends you to check the status page. The server was fine. Your device just went to sleep.
You printed to PDF — now go and find where it went
Print a page to PDF and your brain files it under "downloaded a file → it's in Downloads." It isn't, and it never shows in the download list. So you hunt.
VR asks you to re-draw the boundary you set five minutes ago
You set the play boundary yesterday. And again today. Switch games and it asks you to confirm it once more — same room, same you, nothing changed. Every prompt yanks you out of the world you were in.
Hawaii, 2018: the proof that the pattern kills
For 38 minutes, a whole state believed a ballistic missile was inbound — because a high-stakes, irreversible alert had no confirmation step and no way to take it back.
You just downloaded it — but "Recents" only counts what you've opened
On the Mac, Recents lists files you've opened, not files you saved or downloaded. So the file that arrived thirty seconds ago — the most recent thing you own — isn't in Recents. You go looking. It isn't there.
A "More" menu with no more in it
You promote every item to your sidebar. The "More" expander stays anyway — a chevron promising things that no longer exist. You click it. Nothing.
A command you're told to run, with no hint why
GitHub's new-repo page tells you to run "git branch -M main". On most modern setups it does nothing at all. Six words would have said when you actually need it — instead you pause, or paste on faith.
Dictation eats the words you typed to fix dictation
The recogniser can't spell CrossFit. So you pause, type it by hand, and carry on — and the live transcript overwrites the field, taking your typed words with it. The workaround for the bug is destroyed by the bug.