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Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail

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Re: Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail

#4

Post by switch007 »

te_chris wrote: post #2

The worst part about all this is how much the company that built the site must've charged (I'm guessing somewhere between atmospheric and stratospheric).

Exactly. The olympics are all about maximum profit and spending as little as possible of the money stolen from the public.

From this point of view, none of the olympic shambles (e.g. g4s security) are terribly surprising.

Re: Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail

#5

Post by tlb »

It's common practice to make tickets hard to buy. You might think they would set the price high enough that the tickets barely sell out, but there are good reasons to allocate some tickets to enthusiastic non-wealthy people. They make better live audiences. This is why people stand in line overnight to get those Pink Floyd tickets. Ticketmaster seems to have built the digital equivalent.

Re: Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail

#6

Post by hafabnew »

While you have many valid points, some of them could be contended:

1) Searching by event makes much more sense than 'show me what's available'. It goes some way to help the tickets (mainly) go to the people who specifically want to see _that_ event.

At a guess, you just wanted to see a random event (and that's fine) and the UX sucked for you. But if you were dying to see the Fencing, you might be glad that Fencing tickets were 'randomly' offered to people who just wanted to see anything :).

2) Showing events that are unavailable, again, this makes more sense than the opposite. If the search didn't show these unavailable events, they would undoubtably be inundated with telephone calls from people asking to buy tickets to these events.

Re: Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail

#7

Post by miahi »

hafabnew wrote: post #6

While you have many valid points, some of them could be contended: 1) Searching by event makes much more sense than 'show me what's available'. It goes some way to help the tickets (mainly) go to the people who specifically want to see _that_ event. At a guess, you just wanted to see a random event (and that's fine) and the UX sucked for you. But if you were dying to see the Fencing, you might be glad that Fencing ti…

You can solve 2) easily by adding a simple "Fencing (sold out)" label in the list. But it looks like they cannot really tell if an event is sold out.

Re: Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail

#10

Post by dineshk78 »

miahi wrote: post #7
hafabnew wrote: post #6

While you have many valid points, some of them could be contended: 1) Searching by event makes much more sense than 'show me what's available'. It goes some way to help the tickets (mainly) go to the people who specifically want to see _that_ event. At a guess, you just wanted to see a random event (and that's fine) and the UX sucked for you. But if you were dying to see the Fencing, you might be glad that Fencing ti…

You can solve 2) easily by adding a simple "Fencing (sold out) " label in the list. But it looks like they cannot really tell if an event is sold out.

Well it takes a while for the carrier pigeons to come back with ticket status. You can't have EVERYTHING.
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