A crash and a planned exit can look alike for a second

Endings are where annotators get proud and sloppy. “Crash.” “Rage quit.” “Success.” I have seen all three written against the same kind of cut, a recording that simply stops.

In our log, a stop is a stop. If the last visible action is a save confirmation, we may write “ended after save.” If the last visible action is a spinner, we write “ended on spinner” and we look at the next session from the same identifier, if the sample contains one. Two visits in a row that die on the same spinner are allowed to become a sentence in the memo. One spinner death is an incomplete clip until we know more.

Sound helps when we have it. A system alert is a fact. A muttered word is a quote. Neither is a diagnosis of the operating system. We are not a crash laboratory. We are people reading visits.

Clients sometimes want us to reconcile our endings with their error tickets. We will sit with a liaison and match timestamps. We will not pretend the tickets and the recordings are the same object. Tickets are written after the fact, often by a different person. Recordings are the visit. When they disagree, the memo shows both lines.