Very recent experience with booking sites, and indeed previous ones, makes me seriously question the minds of those who order, design and create booking sites.
Most recent experiences are for Glyndebourne and RSC. According to Jakob Nielsen and others, users generally give up if one has to wait more than 8 seconds for a web site response. The RSC site response is currently around 2-3 minutes per click! Appalling. It's a wonder they sell any tickets.
There are other issues too - is the information presented done in the most efficient way? - can some information be gathered earlier, or later? - and many other factors. I doubt that having faster internet connections would make any difference either - the bottlenecks are at the origin sites.
I find that trying to log in to booking sites is often a very frustrating experience.
The Olympics 2012 were bad - we tried several times and got absolutely zilch - but at least there was a sort of excuse that it was a very large operation, and global.
I do not remember anything like this level of frustration when I used to order tickets for the RFH by post - in advance, based on information from a printed booklet.
I have a suspicion, also, that many of the server and software systems which get deployed for booking sites are just not up to the job - though in fact I believe that they could be made to work if the software had been written to more effectively and to much higher standards. As for testing - does it ever get done? At least rumour has it that the IT designers for London 2012 did do test runs in advance.
Most recent experiences are for Glyndebourne and RSC. According to Jakob Nielsen and others, users generally give up if one has to wait more than 8 seconds for a web site response. The RSC site response is currently around 2-3 minutes per click! Appalling. It's a wonder they sell any tickets.
There are other issues too - is the information presented done in the most efficient way? - can some information be gathered earlier, or later? - and many other factors. I doubt that having faster internet connections would make any difference either - the bottlenecks are at the origin sites.
I find that trying to log in to booking sites is often a very frustrating experience.
The Olympics 2012 were bad - we tried several times and got absolutely zilch - but at least there was a sort of excuse that it was a very large operation, and global.
I do not remember anything like this level of frustration when I used to order tickets for the RFH by post - in advance, based on information from a printed booklet.
I have a suspicion, also, that many of the server and software systems which get deployed for booking sites are just not up to the job - though in fact I believe that they could be made to work if the software had been written to more effectively and to much higher standards. As for testing - does it ever get done? At least rumour has it that the IT designers for London 2012 did do test runs in advance.
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