Sadly for Zalando, I always end up realising: it’s not your clothes. It’s how you wear them. That and the fact I rarely have the money for shopping to begin with. But the best thing about the app is; nothing is getting in my way or trying to make me do something other, than what I want to do.

But let’s rewind to what got me thinking about this in the first place, because it wasn’t Zalando.

It was my cat 🐈

Hooman gaming time is kitty sleepy time!

See, goals are not limited to people alone. Or at least so I realised one evening when my cat had a goal, for which he needed my help.

And that goal was to poop.

Because when he’s not busy sleeping, eating or drinking water from the tap, my cat poops. He poops a lot. For this, he has his very own Poop Castle:

One evening, he was wailing his heart out, and I realised this was of course the Poop Sound. The Poop Sound is the sound he makes when he really needs to poop, but his human needs to clean the Poop Castle first. So I got up from the couch to empty the box for dirty sand and add new, fresh sand to it.

The cat sand I recently bought comes in a box which is very neatly designed. It has a hole you can press open and a tiny “finger hole” for flipping the flip up when you’re pouring, and back down again when you’re finished pouring. The hole itself isn’t extremely large, but big enough to provide a satisfying stream of fresh Poop Sand. Thus providing me with a good User Experience.

Until this specific evening, that is.

I was pouring sand into the Poop Castle until suddenly, to my surprise, the stream of Poop Sand stopped. Mystified, I tried to shake the box, its weight told me there was at least half a Poop Castle of sand left in it. The motion also revealed a thump, which baffled me even more. I shook again and the sound appeared again, confirming that there was indeed some sort of object inside. I turned the box to look at the print on the side of it, and to my surprise discovered the manufacturer had put a free pack of soft cat food inside it.

Normally, I like free things. But this pack of cat food was blocking the hole in the box, cruelly denying me the rest of the precious poop sand.

What was most likely thought as a nice gesture went to shit, quite literally, two minutes later when my cat came in and shat in his Poop Castle. But this of course got me thinking about the bad user experience I’d just had with this product.

It also got me thinking of another other similar experience I’ve had very recently.