The UI Test That Never Caught It (But Our Customer Did)

Let’s talk about the heartbreak of building something you’re proud of… only to have a customer DM you "hey I think this button does nothing?"

UI testing is a cruel joke sometimes. You write all the tests. You click all the things. You mock all the APIs. It all passes. You're green across the board. You ship.

And then—bam—first user hits a state you never imagined, on a device you forgot existed, in a timezone you didn’t even know was real. And that beautiful, polished flow? Breaks in the dumbest, most human way possible.

That’s the thing about UI: it’s where code meets chaos. Where pixel-perfect meets fat-finger. Where logic meets "I didn’t think someone would do that."

And despite all the tools—Playwright, Cypress, Storybook, you name it—no test suite can beat a motivated user with a bug magnet in their pocket.

We do our best. We tighten our CI pipelines. We mock less, test more. We even recruit friends and family for UAT. But sometimes, customers are just better at testing than we are.

So what do we do? We listen. We thank them. We fix fast. We test smarter next time.

But let’s be honest—every time a customer finds a bug before we do, it stings. It’s humbling. It’s also the price of building in the real world.

Here’s to the customers who keep us honest. And to the dream that one day, our UI tests will actually catch that broken flow before it hits production.

One day.