Booking sites or "Lose the will to live, rapidly"

[Dave2002]

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.

[Honoured Guest]

It seems you're talking about booking at or near the opening moments of public online booking for the Glyndebourne season and the West End run of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. At other times, it's a much smoother experience!

[Ferretfancy]

Just wait until Proms Saturday, when RAH booking opens! Last year was a nightmare when I logged on at the correct time only to find that hundreds of people were already in a queue, which according to the instructions should not have been possible. Luckily, I'm usually able to book other London venues bu going to the box office.

[Dave2002]

Ferret

We have experienced the Proms booking - it's nothing like as bad as the RSC! The clever thing about the Proms is the newer system which allows one to make choices in advance - which is a bit like going back to the old days of booking by post.

Honoured G

Bullseye! Only took about an hour for Wolf Hall, but Bring up the Bodies which I booked separately only took about 10 minutes.

Despite that, I still have little faith in those designing the systems. I do have some experience with software design, and my suspicion is that the high load conditions are not catered for particularly well. I don't know what happens with the back end in some of the systems, but phone networks generally protect themselves from overload by restricting access. The Proms and Glyndebourne sites partially do this by having a "waiting room" area before one gets to the actual booking site. There are quite a lot of things which can be done to improve the end user experience, and reduce the waiting time, and a lot of sites do not seem to be designed with that in mind. I reiterate that many don't seem to have been through a rigorous user testing and acceptance process. I do feel that they are designed by people who have more artistic flair, but pretty much zero understanding of software systems and algorithms, and space and time complexity, and wouldn't know the difference between a bubble sort and a quicksort if it came out and hit them. I'm sure they are nice people, but ....

If they are running on third party servers rather than on in-house systems, which seems likely, it should be possible to use virtual machines to increase the server capacity at critical times - allbeit for an additional charge, but some serious hosting sites can do that.

I'm afraid that adding an extra 10% on to the charges after such a disappointing experience prompted me to wait an extra few minutes to remove it - which I did successfully. It would have been possible to do the donations on the original page, without having yet another interaction with the server, and I might have looked on that more favourably.

[amateur51]

It seems you're talking about booking at or near the opening moments of public online booking for the Glyndebourne season and the West End run of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. At other times, it's a much smoother experience!

I'm hoping that RSC has noted RNT's huge success with cinema broadcasts and even now is planning to do the same for the Mantel double-bill

[Ferretfancy]

Dave

With the Proms booking system you are supposed to send in your personal Proms Plan well before the opening day of booking. The idea is that your choices will be stored in advance, making it a swifter transaction. That worked for me, as I only required a Season Pass, but others with more complex requirements found on the day that their choices were not available. Conversely, customers who had not drawn up a Proms Plan in advance got what they wanted! Shurely shome mistake! (ed.)