

Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail - 4clicknet
http://usabilityhell.com/post/28410304040/london2012-olympic-ticketing-fail

======
micheljansen
It's actually even slightly worse than this article suggests.

The sales funnel for ordering tickets from the official website looks roughly
like this:

    
    
      1. Search for tickets. Selecting "only available" actually means "show only those that we don't know are unavailable".
      2. Click on an event. Find out that
         a) the tickets are actually not available at all ("tickets  unavailable" or
         b) only the most expensive tickets are still available (£200+)
         c) there are still tickets you can afford
      3. Add tickets to your shopping list
      4. Proceed to check out and payment
    

The most infuriating part is that at any of these steps you may find out that
the tickets were actually not available after all, __even step 4 __.

What's worse, the shopping list really is a shopping basket, not a wishlist.
You cannot just add tickets to all the events you would potentially like to go
to and then only pay for one pair of those that are available. If you do that,
and in step 4, it turns out that of the 20 tickets you selected, 8 are
available, you can only proceed by paying for all 8 tickets or cancel
altogether (and probably lose the chance to buy tickets, as they are released
into the pool again).

This means that in practice, you keep going through all the steps, adding
tickets to your shopping list, proceed to check out, find out they are
unavailable, go back to shopping list, remove unavailable tickets, rinse and
repeat. It's terrible.

I finally did end up buying tickets, by the way, and I do want to point out
some factual errors in the article:

    
    
      1. There are email alerts for newly released tickets. They are in the newsletter that you can opt-in for when you create an account on the ticketing website.
      2. While there is no clearly marked option "search all available tickets for all sports on all dates in all venues", there are other ways to search than just by sport. You have to specify one of sport, venue or date, which leaves:
        a) searching by venue or group of venues. Most of the sports are in the "Olympic park venues" or the "London venues", so searching by venue group is a LOT more convenient (see http://cl.ly/image/213p2f0r022p).
        b) searching by date. You can simply select the first day of the Olympics and the last day and it will search all sports on all dates in all venues.
    

Both things are far from obvious and the usability problems pointed out are
real, but for the dedicated it's still possible to get tickets.

~~~
djhworld
I've fallen foul (and from anecdotal evidence, many of my peers too) of the
availability displayed not reflecting the actual state of things

I suspect the website uses a materialised view that only refreshes every hour
or so.

~~~
christoph
You're completely correct, search results are cached.

This was easily verifiable when they released tickets while I was searching
for tickets a few days ago. If I searched "Olympic Park venues" & "All days" I
got very different results compared to search "Olympic Park venues" & "28th
July -> 12th August". Clearly those two searches should always return the same
result set.

------
wdr1
Former Ticketmaster Employee here. I was a director of engineering & very much
involved in the ticketing of the 2008 Olympics. I ended up leaving shortly
afterwards for Google. So while I don't have any firsthand knowledge of the
2012 games, I thought I could share some perspective.

\- The Olympic committees often have final say over design, but a lot of
effort is invested. We all know the phrase of something looking like it was
"designed by committee." Well, that's pretty much what happens here. You have
a lot of individual people with great ideas, but many of they diametrically
opposed, not to mention multiple levels of approval. Approval comes from
multiple layers of the of the Olympic committees & the committees are often
political appointees. They may have little-to-no experience with design (or
ticketing), but may still offer "tweaks" and the like. Everyone has the best
intentions, but, well...

\- CAPTCHAs suck, but it or something similar is needed. Scalpers _pound_ the
site. I know fines have been raised, but all that really did was drive it
underground, away from the everyday person. (Not to mention resulted in lots
of empty seats.) Without it, almost every ticket would end up in the hands of
scalpers.

\- To that end, most of his "This is bad" section doesn't apply. The vast
majority of events sell out. The empty seats aren't because tickets didn't
sell, it's because they're sold & people didn't show. I hope the 2016 Olympics
learns from this & allows them be re-sold.

\- In 2008, we had a simple grid to show what events were & were not still
available. I'm not sure why that was dropped. I disagree with only showing
events that still have inventory. A common use case is people have their
tickets, but want to hop online as the event nears to get more details. Having
that data readily available is a good thing.

A lot of it is typical blog snark, so I may have missed some of other valid
points.

However, the last thing I'd add is the that the technology behind ticketing is
_hard_. Prior to Google, I'd worked at Yahoo. Those are the only two companies
I know of that have both the technology & talent to build a credible ticketing
system. Most people who people who tell me they could start a company that
could crush Ticketmaster's technology and even have thoughts about the MySQL
schema make me chuckle. They often just stare blankly when it's pointed out
that tickets are not a fungile resource, not realizing what that means or
scaling challenges it presents. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the
problems.

~~~
ldd-
When I was in Germany in 2006 during the World Cup, they had an online system
in place to allow people to return their tickets. They would then periodically
re-release those tix into the pool . . . it was through that reissue process
that I secured all of my tix.

Of course, the Olympics is a far more complex set of events, but I'd have to
imagine it would have been easy to implement this year (6 years later).

~~~
wdr1
I'm relatively certain people can already return Olympic tickets.

------
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.

~~~
mistercow
Wouldn't letting the tickets sell out almost instantly achieve the same
result? You'd sell only to those enthusiastic enough to sit there hitting the
reload button until the exact moment when they become available.

~~~
andrewingram
But in the long run you end up creating the perception that the ONLY way to
buy tickets is camping the website at availability time. Which I suspect would
likely result in people just not bothering in the end.

------
te_chris
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).

~~~
switch007
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.

~~~
DanBC
G4S are a tier 3 sponsor of the Olympics. Thus, they paid £10m to be a
sponsor.

G4S were also involved, before they got the contract, in the bid for the
Olympics.

Pretty sleazy.

~~~
_delirium
Tangent: G4S, and their predecessor Securicor, should win some kind of award
for cyberpunk-esque corporate branding. A nebulous private security company
named as an inscrutable 3-letter code (now), or as the very generic "Security
Corporation" (then) are both pretty good. Also, the former slogan, "Securicor
Cares".

------
spindritf
While people who try to make the process easier are being arrested

> London's Metropolitan Police said they had arrested 16 people since Friday
> for illegal reselling of Olympics tickets

And then everyone is shocked by the empty seats.

[http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/timworstall/100019212/o...](http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/timworstall/100019212/of-
course-there-are-empty-olympic-seats-our-victorian-government-is-arresting-
anyone-who-tries-to-sell-them/)

~~~
ollysb
I had tickets for the olympics and was unable to attend. I tried over several
days to try and get the tickets reallocated, I wasn't even interested in
getting any money for them, just wanted them to be used by someone else.
Supposedly this can be done from the website but the expected link was
replaced by a message saying my tickets were ineligible for resale. I then
tried to phone customer support to see if there was any other way to let other
people use the tickets (you have to have your name on the tickets so you can't
just give them to family or friends). After hearing a recorded message I was
then told that the call would now be disconnected. I then tried to phone the
sales line, this time I managed to speak to someone but they told me that I
needed to phone the customer support number to do anything about the tickets.
When I told them that the line was just a recorded message they told me that
the customer support line would disconnect if it was too busy... After several
failed attempts to call the support line the event went ahead with 2 empty
seats. Watching the coverage on tv it appeared that I was far from being the
only person that had these problems...

------
keithpeter
Does anyone else think that the original article would have been better with a
simple 'walk through' of the process, then an evaluative comment, perhaps
referencing against UI literature?

(Ticketmaster = confusion and stumbling, we are used to that in UK.)

------
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.

~~~
miahi
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.

~~~
dineshk78
Well it takes a while for the carrier pigeons to come back with ticket status.
You can't have EVERYTHING.

------
kevinprince
Ticketing is just plain hard and anyone who disagrees is just wrong.

The site is getting a few hundred thousands users a day right now trying to
ger a few thousand tickets mostly between 7pm and 10pm.

While I agree LOGOC could of got a lot of the copy and menus better, trying to
display "real-time" availability and keeping ticket sales fair is very very
hard and Ticketmaster are doing a fairly decent job.

~~~
mseebach
No, ticketing is fairly easy.

Fairly allocating a severely undersupplied stock of tickets without allowing
the price mechanism to arbitrate is very hard.

Thinking it's a technology problem, when it's an economics problem, doesn't
make it any easier.

~~~
matthewowen
'Fairly allocating a severely undersupplied stock of tickets without allowing
the price mechanism to arbitrate is very hard.'

This is part of ticketing. This is a challenge. So ticketing isn't easy.

~~~
mseebach
Plenty of events, in fact the vast majority of them, don't suffer from this
undersupply.

~~~
matthewowen
That's very true. But it's true for many fields that most of the
difficulty/challenge/complexity comes from a relatively small proportion of
the cases.

------
buyx
Poorly thought-out websites seem to be a pattern with high profile sporting
events.

The 2010 FIFA World Cup site was shoddier than the Olympics, with rapid time
outs, and other instabilities. They also lacked any way of keeping bots out,
and I suspect a few people made money by blasting the site with automated
ticket requests.

------
Jgrubb
As a native Atlantan who was 18 during the 1996 games, I recall tickets being
absolutely easy to get (many for below face value) pretty much anywhere you
went in the Olympic village area. If you don't care which event you get into,
the easiest hack is to just go down there and buy them in person.

~~~
micheljansen
The London 2012 Olympic tickets are not for resale. The terms and conditions
for the tickets dictate that they cannot be resold and any tickets that are
resold are considered invalid. Of course they cannot possibly check that for
all tickets, but so far it seems to work because I haven't seen anyone trying
to resell tickets.

~~~
JimmyL
There are also much stronger laws (and enforcement practices) around reselling
sports tickets in the UK than in the US.

~~~
micheljansen
Yep, reselling tickets is actually illegal and can land you in jail (or at
least a hefty fine): <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-19109747>

------
robinjfisher
You can search across all sports - just don't select one. Choose a from date
and to date and search.

Agree with the rest of your comments. The "currently unavailable" and "these
are not currently on sale" are particularly disappointing.

