The Divine Comedy of the Everyday User

You’ve been there. The form won’t submit. The verification code never shows up.
The chatbot throws you a link to an FAQ that answers everything except your question.
And the “Cancel” button? Tiny, grey and buried at the bottom of the page like it’s ashamed of itself.

So let’s imagine: What if Dante wrote his Divine Comedy today?
What would each of the nine circles of modern digital suffering look like?

Circle 1: The Limbo of Eternal Sign-Up

And just when you finally make it to the end, the system gently informs you:
“This account already exists.”

In Dante’s Inferno, the first circle was for souls who deserved neither Heaven nor Hell.
Here, it’s for users who just wanted to sign up… And now float forever between a timed-out session and a button that does nothing.

Circle 2: The CAPTCHA That Could Drive an Angel Mad

You’re on your third attempt to “select all squares with traffic lights.” And somehow… you’re still wrong.

One square shows only half a pole. Another has something kinda like a light or maybe a pipe? You click anyway, and boom – new image. Now it’s bicycles. Then boats. Then mountain tunnels.

By the fifth round, you start questioning not the CAPTCHA, but your very humanity. Because maybe (just maybe) you are a robot. And so you remain, trapped forever between a truck that might be a tractor, and a fire hydrant hiding somewhere in the corner of the frame.

Circle 3: Kafkaesque Customer Support

And just when you think it’s over: а follow-up email kindly asking you to rate the quality of the support… that never actually happened.

Circle 4: The Terms & Conditions from Hell

62 pages of fine print. Nobody reads them, and, honestly, you’re not supposed to.

Just hit the big shiny “I Accept” button and automatically agree to:
data collection, storage, sharing, tracking, merging, targeting, retargeting, syncing, profiling, forwarding to third, fourth, and possibly imaginary parties plus future use of your data to train AI models you’ll never know about.

This is the inferno of modern contracts. Consent is optional in theory. In practice? It’s agree or get lost.

Circle 5: The Notification Vortex – A Marketer’s Stream of Consciousness

This is the circle where every app thinks it’s your soulmate. And every notification demands your full emotional availability.

Do Not Disturb? Yeah, that button’s just for decoration.

Circle 6: The Flaming UX Traps

There is an opt-out button. Somewhere. Probably.

The “Stay Subscribed” button? Big, bright, flashing like a carnival ride.
Unsubscribing? That’s a 7-click journey with 3 confirmation pop-ups and a guilt trip.
Deleting your account? You’ll need to handwrite a formal request, sign it, and mail it to Tallinn.

In this circle, designers are punished by having to use the exact interfaces they created.
Forever.

Circle 7: The Flood of Irrelevant Recommendations

Вам може сподобатись те, що ви вже дивились.
Але ми запропонуємо щось геть інше.

But instead here’s a soap-making tutorial, a store selling hamster Halloween costumes,
and a 10-minute video of someone power-washing a rug.
You never searched for this. You never clicked on anything remotely related.
And yet – here it is.

In this circle, you don’t get to choose. The algorithm has already decided who you are.What you get isn’t helpful suggestions. Just a stream of algorithmic guesswork, flailing in the dark.

Circle 8: The Digital Bureaucracy Maze

It all looks simple enough. You just want to book an in-person appointment.

Slots open three times a week: from 12:01 to 12:11 AM. Miraculously, you get one. You pick the time, the date, the location. The system then asks for your taxpayer number, passport ID, your mother’s maiden name, and a scanned document in .rtf format, under 1.5 MB.

You fill it all out. Click “Submit.” And get hit with: “Session expired. Please log in again.”

Now your slot is gone. And the form? Wiped clean.

This time, the dropdown for “Select Region” doesn’t work. Which means you can’t select a district. Which means the city field won’t appear. And the city field is required. While you’re trying to outsmart this logic puzzle from hell, all the appointments vanish.

Better luck next time.

Circle 9: The Inferno of Artificial Illusions

This is where those who forgot about critical thinking now serve their time – led astray by machines they trusted too easily.

One soul wanders a digital library, searching for a book recommended by an AI. It doesn’t exist, but somehow it’s ranked #3 on the “Top 100 Modern Philosophy” list. Another presents a thesis built on research that was never conducted. Someone else confidently tells a crowd that in 2021, a chimpanzee was elected mayor of a small Canadian town.

Here, there’s no line between fact and fiction. Everything sounds plausible. Everything looks official. But nothing can be verified, because the fact-checker is also AI.

The Way Out of Hell

Chances are, you’ve been through at least one of these circles. We all have. Endless forms. Broken CAPTCHAs. Battles with chatbots. And subscriptions that feel harder to escape than a gym contract.

But is there such a thing as digital paradise? Maybe. Maybe it shows up in the rare places where things just… work.

Where creating an account doesn’t raise your blood pressure. Where buttons are easy to find. Where AI helps instead of hallucinating. Where services remember what you actually care about – and don’t drown you in noise.

Good UX isn’t loud. It’s invisible.

It’s when you do the thing you came to do – easily, smoothly, without swearing once – and then move on with your life.