Some more rants: 1. Tell me accurately whether trying again will accomplish anything. Don't say "try again in a few moments" if the error is essentially fatal.

Some more rants: 1. Tell me accurately whether trying again will accomplish anything. Don't say "try again in a few moments" if the error is essentially fatal. Your summer intern's flaky microservice can't keep up? Then sure, go ahead and tell me to roll the dice and hope to get luckier on the next submit. But if my session has expired, don't keep showing me the button that you know requires a valid session to succeed. 2. Similarly, if I need to do something differently to succeed, then tell me what to do. Don't just say "Sorry, try again." If it's my auth error, then tell me to try different credentials. If it's your transient error, then tell me so. Don't make me play 20 Questions with your form submission flow. (Yes, there can be security reasons why you don't want to reveal exactly what's wrong with a bad request. You can still provide a better experience than Human Binary Search.) 3. Are you seriously going to make me press this button again and again for the next 10 minutes? Isn't repetitive activity exactly what computers are for? Sure, there's the risk of your clients DDOSing your server when something goes wrong. But that's what exponential and/or randomized backoff is for. It's insulting to distill your entire UX down to the world's worst CAPTCHA in the form of a single "press me again for an unknown number of times" button. Press it for me, and tell me when you did what I asked! 4. I'm looking at you, every smart speaker ever. "Sorry, Spotify couldn't fulfill that request." OK, but do you think that means that I changed my mind about wanting to hear the song? I feel a special kind of rage knowing my Alexa history has five consecutive "Alexa, play Dolly Parton Here You Come Again" requests, spoken increasingly stridently each time. It's like Rant #3 but making me write out the request in crayon rather than press a button. If you're actually an assistant, then assist me by hiding Spotify's endless spurious errors from me and taking care of them. Don't make me fill the 60 seconds of silence by shouting louder and louder at you. Tell me "I'm sorry, Spotify is having trouble with your request. I'm still working on it." Then play the damn song.