A light post for a light week

Screenshot of the shipping section of a form, where ground shipping will arrive June 12, or for thirteen dollars more expedited shipping will arrive the same date

Nothing says “We tested the edge cases” like offering me free regular shipping that arrives on June 12 for free or expedited shipping that costs $12.95 and also arrives on June 12.

True story: the state of Pennsylvania has shifted to a print-your-own-registration-forms format for car registration. (Your car must be registered for it to be legally drivable.)

When they used to mail your registration, they charged $2 for a second copy to be stuck in the envelope.

Now, they still offer the $2 fee for a second copy… but you’re downloading a PDF and printing it yourself. (You can print as many copies as you have printer toner and paper.) And if you do pay the $2, they give you the same PDF they gave you the first time.

So it’s really become a “are you paying attention?” tax on drivers.

Form asks how many duplicate registration cards you would like at a cost of $2 each, and then warns that the duplicates will e included in the document at the end of the transaction. No duplicates will be sent in the mail. So you're spending $2 per duplicate to have extra length added to the pdf file when you could just print the pdf file multiple times.
Or I could just print two copies of the PDF

Test your edge cases and your processes, folks.

Author: Anne Gibson

anne gibson is a Senior Staff Product Designer and General Troublemaker working on design systems from outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She's an editor and writer at The Interconnected. She is also published at A List Apart and The Pastry Box, and publishes short fiction when she's not persuading the terriers to stop wrecking things. (The terriers are winning.)