Checkout Circus
I just finished ordering tickets for my brother and myself to go see Richard Dawkins’ lecture “The Purpose of Purpose” at the Northrop Auditorium on March 4th. I would encourage anyone else in the area to attend. Dawkins is a great speaker and it is sure to be a good time.
My brother used to work at the Northrop, I’ve been to a number of shows there, and I’ve never had a bad experience. And I’m sure it’s just a third-party product, but their ticket ordering system is a joke. Well, it would be a joke if it weren’t so painful.
(For best effect, play the scary clown circus music in your head–ba ba da-la-da-da da da…)
First of all, it just looks bad. You know ugly when you see it.
Second, fields that have no business being drop-downs are in fact drop-downs–yes, the city and email fields are drop-downs. (?!) I was completely speechless.
But even better is the fact that, in all of the drop-down fields, once you’ve entered your information in that field and then moved on to another field, the values you entered appear to have disappeared…but don’t worry, they’re there.
Then, if you happed to go backwards in the checkout process at all, you get all sorts of random, cryptic, or even blank validation errors.
Which, like almost every other kind of error, success, or status message, is a JavaScript alert pop-up. Nice.
Sometimes these validation errors will take you to new and exotic destinations that you didn’t know existed, like a really pathetic captcha that you were never presented previously, but that, before even seeing it, you are notified that you’ve done it wrong. One time I even ended up at the Gopher sports ticket ordering page.
Another wonderful feature is that you have to create an account, which is good, because I don’t have enough accounts online and now, a year from now when I want to go to something else at the Northrop Auditorium, I can try to create another account, fail, because I’ve already created an account with that email address, not be able to log in to this account because I won’t remember my password, try to get them to reset my password, at which point they’ll probably send me my current password in plain text, which will make me throw something heavy across the room.
But my very favorite part was when I was prompted to select a password for this completely unnecessary account. I was a bit surprised to see just how seriously they took the responsibility of protecting my name and address by insisting on the following:
Note: Your password must contain at least: 8 characters, one upper case letter, one lower case letter, one number, and one symbol.
Holy shit! I’ve never created a password that strong! Hell, I don’t think I’ve been issued a randomly-generated password that strong, not even at a national nuclear security research laboratory! To further reassure me that my precious zip code is in good hands, when I submitted that page, a friendly JavaScript alert pop-up informed me:
Customer created.
Username: mnphenow
Password: AB12cd#$Please write this information down in a safe place!
Sweet Jesus! You mean write it down in a safe place…like in PLAIN TEXT floating around in the tubes?! Ummm… I… ah… Speechless. I’ve got nothing. The angels are weeping.
If I did not want to see Richard Dawkins so much, I would not have given them my credit card number, which, thank the Lord, they do not appear to store.
But, I guess this is to be expected. After all, how good of a website can you build when you’re charging TWELVE DOLLARS IN FEES ON EIGHTEEN DOLLARS WORTH OF TICKETS?!
Order Admission Total $18.00
Order Charge Total $12.00
Total $30.00
January 29th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Brutal. I absolutely hate it when companies send me plaintext passwords when I need to recover them.
FYI the ticket site is currently down, stating that “Online sales cannot proceed with transactions at this time.”
It would be nice if there was a simple, unobtrusive way to check if a company’s web tech sucks before investing time in an onerous registration process.
February 5th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
There’s an interesting idea Matt. I’m also interested in seeing this. I might just have to stop on over at the northrup to buy my tix though. I wonder if you can get them without the fees if you buy at the box office.
February 9th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
You had me going there with the Dawkins intro, and then cruelly twisted the topic to web design (though frankly just as interesting). I look forward to reading a review of the lecture.