Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail | Hacker News Reader

Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail

usabilityhell.com

118 points4clicknet41 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

I think "underpaid developers on tight schedule" is far more likely than "look, the specs said 'hard to buy', you need to put in two extra steps and a random wait!".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

Ticketmaster should no better as they are the main ticket operator in the UK. However to make matters worse I believe they have signed all these exclusivity deals with record companies etc, which means there is no serious competition, certainly for the next few years. Therefore they don't care and so innovation will be throttled. I think they should be fined, as they have been consistently the worst part, of an otherwise truely outstanding games. Ticketmaster you should be ashamed!

Couldn't the Olympic authorities have set up a ticket system inside the ridiculous number of billions spent - they could then develop and expand the system, opening sourcing it to meet with their supposed noble goals, the improved version could then be used for Rio, ...

I can't find the direct link, but I remember seeing an article that said the following happens after every Olympics:

1. There is some level of scandal over ticketing

2. The IOC forms a technical committee to look into it

3. The technical committee says that the Olympics is a relatively unique ticketing situation (all the different buckets of tickets, how they change, when they're released, etc.), and that the best solution would be to invest ~$200M in a custom ticketing solution which the IOC would own, and could then lease to the organizing committees and other international event

4. The IOC executive says that it's a sports organization - and not a logistics company - and reminds itself that sales are the responsibility of the host Committee, so they should deal with it and figure it out, and then kills the idea.

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...

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...

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.)

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.

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.

I think with 1) it's less relavent now that the Olympics is on, ticket availability is very sparse.

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.

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.

'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.

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

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.

Having built a few highly trafficked sites (in Airline, Education and Events Ticketing) I think that ticketing is actually pretty easy. Making something that is usable & simple is still hard work. But the actual processes behind tickets is fairly straightforward.

I've built a system for the planning and seating of VIP hospitality packages that has been used for Beijing & London as well as the last Rugby World cup. Admittedly my ticket app is only for a select group of clients & users, so I haven't needed to scale anywhere near to the same degree as LOCOG, but I have done so with other sites in the past and the scaling techniques are the same.

That said, with the benefit of hindsight, I think the ideal way to have done ticket resale, would have been for people to register interest in events, possibly taking payment information in advance. Any inventory released back to LOCOG could have then been randomly offered to people who'd registered interest. There would be some element of first-in first served, but you're always going to get that with oversubscribed events.

Of course, in the UK we don't have much choice other than Ticketmaster and SeeTickets. While there are alternatives for the smaller events, I think there's a chance the whole system could be disrupted.

The problem would be a lot easier to solve if you change the culture of releasing all your tickets at 9am, inviting hundreds of thousands of people to hammer your site all at once, at that specific time.

I think moving away from first come first served would also help, and the London 2012 ticketing process did give this a reasonable shot (although it could be argued with limited success, IMO because they didn't allocate enough seats in this fashion). It would be more straightforward for concert tickets where there are only 1 or 2 price bands for a small number of shows.

Something that was very successful but is rarely mentioned was the ticket resale process. Most people I know who returned tickets this way got their money back and it appears to have done a good job of reducing the size of the secondary ticket market.

While ticketing is harder than people think, have you ever dealt with Ticketmaster's technologies?

Not fun can be an understatement.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

This is certainly not the case for London 2012. I was at the athletics on Friday evening, the park is rammed. There were a couple of touts on the walk from the stadium but only offering to purchase tickets rather than selling them. No tickets available at the box office.

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.

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