Plus Ca Change

A few minutes ago, the weekly email from San Francisco Symphony landed in my mailbox. Besides urging us to buy tickets to Bluebeard's Castle, there's the news that Compose Your Own subscriptions are available as of today.

You know what's coming, right? Yes, another complaint about the deficiencies of the SFS ticketing system. Because it seems to be set up pretty much the way it was set up last year, which is to say, the only way to buy a Compose Your Own right now is to pick the number of tickets, the concerts, and the sections you want.

I will have to wait until later in the year, I guess, to do what I want, unless I can bring myself to go to the ticketing window at Davies some Saturday. I'd really rather not. It's a big chunk of time out of my day; I'd rather do it on line; I'm not the most patient person in the world, and why should a perfectly nice person at SFS suffer because of me? Better I should get annoyed at the software.

The thing you need to know is that Tessitura, SFS's ticketing system, can be programmed to do whatever they damn well please. It just takes some cash. If the ticketing system doesn't do this, it's because a decision someone made, whether because they think what they have is good enough or because they're not willing to write the check.

Also, this is a big, big mistake:

See the button that says GET STARTED and the button that says CONTINUE?

They do the same thing. Way to confuse your customers!

A bit further down the page is a flip book, which is a slow and clumsy way to let people flip through a booklike representation of a brochure or book. I can't tell you how much I hate them, not to mention, they're Flash-drive and completely inaccessible to people who use screen readers.

I haven't gotten far enough into the ticket purchase flow to see whether there are any further UX errors like this, but I bet there are.

Last but not least, this is the 2,000th posting published to Iron Tongue of Midnight. If you're reading this, whether you've read 3, 10, 300, or every last one, you have my deepest thanks and gratitude for your time, thought, and comments.