The other side of the e-ticket is the ordering experience. This one wasn’t especially smooth.
Mostly, because I am presented with information I don’t need to know about, and essential information about the process is missing.
Some problems: When I have to make an extra account for the payment (which is ok I guess, but not really necessary), I have to do this at the paylogic website. There’s no reason for this. Just let me make an account at the Bimhuis site. I don’t need to know who your payment service provider is, or to be presented with their branding. Just talk directly to me, Bimhuis, I trust you already, otherwise I wouldn’t be ordering.
Now I am not being redirected to the paylogic site, instead it is loaded in an inline frame. Which generates another problem: the space on the Bimhuis site is too small for the registration form, and I am presented with scrollbars. The cramped feeling here doesn’t feel good when I’m paying something. My trustmeter is going down.
The most important problem though is how the final payment is handled. I just ordered my ticket, and I’m ready to pay for it. Since I chose iDeal, I’m waiting to be redirected to my bank’s website. Waiting for something. To happen. But nothing happens.
So I go directly to the paylogic website with my login. There’s my order! Can I pay it here? No. I have to do it from the ordering process. But in the orginal window, there’s no link I can click. Just a static page telling me I’m paying through Paylogic, for the Bimhuis, and the payment is handled by Docdata Payment. This is way more information than I need to know, and no simple link to complete the process.
I guess this is an issue with Safari’s pop-up blocker, which I turn off to order second ticket (hoping the first one magically goes away, since I cannot remove it). And indeed: the second time, the window seems to reload itself from the inline frame, and redirects to the website for my bank. Yep, this sure looks like a hack. But it works, I can pay for my ticket.
How easy would it have been to just include a link for me too complete my process, or a message stating pop-up blockers get in the way of the ordering process? You do test the site against different browsers and operating systems, no?
Last Wednesday I got my ticket for the Bill Frisell gig at the Bimhuis directly from their website. First off, I like the concept. You order a concert ticket online, then you print it yourself. You come at the place and your self-printed ticket appears to be valid. Still: I actually pay you to print something myself, which doesn’t look like a ticket at all. The experience is totally utalitarian. There’s no classic ticket feel about it.
Tickets frequently have some kind of watermark to prevent them from being counterfeited. Of course these marks are missing. But the ticket could be made to look more valuable.
On the other hand, if you like the utilitarian aspect, think about this. Since the concertgoer prints on a single sheet of A4, the Bimhuis used the remaining whitespace for some information about themselves. Now wouldn’t it be nice if you actually had the information about the concert on there? It wouldn’t need to be specially designed; just reserve a fixed block for a photo and a few lines of text.
Some people might cut out the actual part with the barcode, which makes the ticket smaller and allows it to be put into small pockets more easily. There’s no symbol of scissors though, so I guess this is not a recommended action. Which bothers me; I know I paid for this piece of paper, but would cutting it out be ok? Or would I invalidate the ticket by doing that?
It’s that time of year again: media outlets are collecting news from the past year.
Over here the NOS Public Television has restored the Polygoon annual reviews from 1956 to now, and they started streaming them yesterday when I watched the first one: Prague Spring, Suez crisis, Eisenhowers second term, and our first female cabinet minister.
I found it kind of endearing to see Luns receiving Mieke Bouwman, a Dutch Woman who had been representing Dutch citizens on trial in Indonesia. This big man, speaking Dutch so correctly, remaining a course Batavian nonetheless, speaking out against the unfair trials, but clearly not being in any position to influence their course.
Why websites need big type.
Great plea by Information Architects Japan for using large body type when designing for the web.
Their rebuttal of people opposed to scrolling is spot on:
“Don’t tell us scrolling is bad
Because then all websites are bad. There is nothing wrong with scrolling. Nothing at all. Just as there is nothing wrong with flipping pages in books.”
Have been working on lots of different projects lately:
Wobbe van der Meulen opened his exhibition ‘Het oog van de flat’ in Amsterdam Zuidoost last week. He did some great pinhole photography in obscured flat apartments in the Egeldonk, and asked me to make flyers, posters, and designs for the exhibition panels. You can find out more on this page about het oog van de flat on his website.
Emily and I are working on her new website, which should be finished soon. Below is one of the animations which didn’t make it. This is probably what I am working on when you try to call me and I don’t pick up the phone. Last weekend I decided to migrate the code to the latest Actionscript. AS 3 is nice, but it does take some time getting used to.
wolfspeelt.nl (you guessed it, the site for Wolfspeelt, the cooperation of director/writer Denise Schreuder and saxophone player Esmée Olthuis) is now live. A little rough around the edges still.
And of course I also have my day job at Cascade, where new web projects have been started, after a bit of a lull in which we finally completed the new Cascade website.
So where is this going? Lots of work and too little time off it seems.
I am grateful for the two days off.
My computing devices (smartphone, laptop) do not have the ability to ignore daylight saving time. More still, they do not announce whether they use it or not. So this morning when I woke up, I was unsure how late it actually was. I miss the option, somewhere deep in system preferences maybe, which says ‘use daylight saving time or not’.
I do not like the way one of the most essential elements of human experience is automated.
This is progress: ten years or so ago, system updates contained the wrong time adjustments for some time zones. Now, we must blindly trust the machines, or keep an analogue clock for peace of mind.
My parents told me the story how they stayed up late when daylight saving time was introduced, so they could adjust the time at the exact moment.
In the process of designing the structure for a web site and the navigation to disclose that information, I often find there’s lots of changing around in unexpected moments. I have this ideal where the design process is a linear thing, and through experience, learning from others and listening to the people involved I can get to the perfect method. In practice though the steps just do not bend themselves to my rules.
What would be ideal is: going from the larger view and tunneling to the detail. I know that when getting to the detail, this also gives us a different view of the structure overhead. And in understanding the words we understand the whole. This is what known as the hermeneutic circle. I’m a bit rusty on my Gadamer though, and it’s showing.
One of the elements which makes the process difficult in information architecture for a web site, is the different people involved and the moments in time they are involved. There are people on the agency side, and people on the clients side. Not everyone starts together. So the opinions they have might come into play at a later moment and disrupt a carefully staged vision. Which in a way, of course, is a good thing: the more people have their say, the more representative the IA will be for a larger user group, barring any user testing. But on the other hand, developing a vision and a clear structure is more difficult when lots of voices are trying to outdo each other.
One of my colleagues made the perfect case yesterday, in her argument that navigation for a site should always be visible ‘because that’s just how I use it’. At least she was honest about this being a personal preference; more often, especially at a higher level, choices are made for users for their own good. Hey, I’m no stranger to the sentiment.
So at the moment it just seems to me the people involved have to be involved at the right moment. Timing is critical. As for the perspective of speaking on behalf of the user, I guess I need some better tools to validate what this means, so I can make myself and others be aware of the pitfalls in thinking for others.
Sonst bleiben Mails unbeantwortet, was sicherlich aus Verfassersicht ärgerlich, aus Sicht der Empfänger mit mehreren Hundert E-Mails in der Woche aber nicht anders zu bewerkstelligen ist.
