I wanted to buy some tickets to see The Philadelphia Story[1] so I wandered over to the Old Vic web site. There’s a “book online” link there that takes you to the Ticketmaster page for that show.
So far, so good. But this is where it all starts to go wrong. The Ticketmaster page is just a list of dates. I know I want three tickets. I know what price I’m prepared to pay. I know there are a few dates that I can’t go. But I don’t really care what date I go on. So I choose a random date in a couple of weeks time. I’m asked how many tickets I want and what price I want to pay. When I fill those in and click the continue button I find that the tickets I want aren’t available for that date. In order to change my selection I have to go back two pages and choose a different date. Which also doesn’t have the tickets I want available. I try this a few more times before getting bored and giving up.
Surely that’s not a very unusual way to want to buy tickets. Almost every time I go to the theatre I’m making the same kind of query – “show me the dates where you have x tickets available for less than £y”. Don’t most people do the same thing? And that’s exactly the kind of query that the Ticketmaster site is not set up to support. Did they do any any user testing on this interface before releasing it?
The backend of the site is bound to be a database of some kind. How hard would it be to add some more flexible query facilities?
I was going to report this to the site owners, but I can’t find any contact email addresses on the site at all. Which also points to a certain kind of arrogance where they don’t care what their users think of them.
So I’m off to the Old Vic to buy tickets from the Box Office. The good, old-fashioned way.
[1] And, by the way, whoever thought it was a good idea to make that page out of images should be banned from ever building another web page.
I think the real problem is convincing the bean counters that usability design can at least break even, and that it’s not just a cost. The story of customers turning away should certainly make any decent businessman pay attention! Most likely the marketing department would be pretty keen to pick up on this.Perhaps there is a wider issue in all of this, beyond usability. Having been a part of the software development community, and now doing an MBA, I’ve never seen a decent short article that lays down a guide as to the main tasks of software development and how they relate to business objectives. In my opinion, many business people tend to treat IT as more of a black box than they should, and so they miss out on some of the benefits.Something about 3 or 4 pages long, nothing more. Preferably with nice diagrams. Or push the boat out and get an article in Harvard Business Review, the holy book! This would probably need to put forward quite a simple generic model, but with the text acknowledging that there’s no one-size-fits-all. Simplicity and big themes are what managers like! If it can be dressed up as a nice framework, preferably with an acronym, so much the better!So come on Dave, get sharpening that pencil! :)