New Royal Opera House website

[Cockney Sparrow]

I appreciate, whether its a disaster or not depends how one approaches booking. Its easier for me, I'm not much interested in Ballet, nor rehearsals/other events, so its mainly Main Stage and Linbury (and only some of the things on at Linbury) and I can use the filters.

For myself, its always been something of a logistical exercise. Q1 - what am I interested to see - Work, conductor, performers (?does producer deter) etc. Once I've identified those - and often different cast members narrow down dates - I have to rule out dates I'm not free to go. After that I rank the remaining dates in order of preference (all of this with pencil, paper, eraser one sheet per production). Then as the moment of booking opens,the sheets and dates have been ranked in order of those productions likely to sell fastest.

These aspects have always been the same in internet booking. As opposed to postal booking I don't have to take the chance of when my application is pulled off the pile of papers. It may prove to be the case that research for me might be a bit harder prior to booking opening. But the main concern is navigating from one production to another and then into individual performances to buy the tickets. My dummy run should help.

However, I suppose I should leave my input here for the moment. I'm looking at making it work for me, perhaps I'm conditioned by the BBC - once they have decided on something, we can forget about complaining as it makes no difference. Let's hope the ROH will be more responsive and add some features that give others what they want to see.

[Constantbee]

OK OK I see the problem now Actually, I had no difficulty at all buying a ticket online yesterday, as soon as booking (for Boris) opened, but then I had modest requirements and knew exactly what I wanted, and for which performance. Also, using an old desktop probably made it easier than booking using a phone or a tablet. It’s certainly true that the graphics and the small print are designed for a bigger display. I did see a basic pop-up user experience feed back form in the bottom right hand corner, but it wasn't much good and ROH certainly needs to know users aren’t happy and why not

[alywin]

If you actually rate the site using the pop-up, it then asks you for feedback on why you've given it that rating. ("Not fit for purpose" is probably unhelpful!)

If I pick a specific date on the calendar, I want to know what specific events (probably performances only) are on on that day. If it's ballet or opera, I may want to know what the casting is. I'd also appreciate being able to see them all without too much scrolling (all these extra events which are now available making that rather more difficult), as I used to, when there tended to be perhaps 3 events maximum on the average day.

As for filtering, I could conceivably be wanting to go to opera and ballet, main stage, Clore and Linbury, for any one booking period. That doesn't narrow down the results that much. Plus I don't think the old links for each booking period work "properly" any more - they seem to take you to filtered results for that period (perhaps), but there's still a lot of scrolling involved to find out what's on. Fortunately there wasn't much for the summer that I wanted to book - and I've permanently got 4 browser tabs open in the hope of finding spare tickets for other events - but I can see it becoming a real nightmare once the autumn season approaches and there are lots of different events I want to go to. I suspect I may just not bother booking for a lot of them, because it's now so much effort.