How many screen-taps to get through your customer funnel? Three? Five?
By my count, about 17,000
Mme D looks at me furtively over the breakfast table and whispers: “Go on, but make it quick.”
I promise to do my best but cannot guarantee anything once it’s… ahem… taken out of my hands. I mean, I’ve only just, er, got up and I’m not sure I have the necessary equipment. Looking down, I wonder: “How long will I need?”
That’s right: we have decided to buy some tickets to a show after reading about it in this morning’s newspaper. Mme D was concerned that they may already have sold out. I’d left my phone upstairs. I looked at my watch to check the time.
Jeez, do I need to explain all my double entendres? Get a grip for goodness’ sake.
I fetch my phone, launch Firefox, browse to the venue website, navigate to this particular show and tap on the BUY TICKETS button. Easy, now let’s…
Ah, it’s asking me if I have previously registered for an account. I don’t know the answer to this question and, unfortunately, the website UX designers somehow forgot to include a DON’T KNOW button. I imagine that if these designers had been working on an astronomy app, there’d be a question such as “Is the Moon in the seventh house and has Jupiter aligned with Mars?” and you’d have to pick between YES or NO.
Possibly also CANCEL but only as a kind of in-joke as this would take you to an entirely empty page and delete your current browser history, forcing you to return to the Home page and start again. Such larks, those UX guys have.
I check my Firefox saved passwords, my Chrome saved passwords, my KeePass database and the little strips of torn paper that litter my desk. Nope, there’s no record of registering an account with this ticketing site. So I’ll click NO and go ahead as a guest. Find the date… pick a performance… two tickets… there were only 10 left, phew, what luck! … there we go.
Now comes the exciting bit: the site tells me I have 17 minutes to complete my purchase before the tickets are released back to other punters. Why is it 17 and not, I dunno, a round 15 or 20? Mine is not to know the reason why. They probably spent tens of thousands of euros on market research and watching focus groups through two-way mirrors to arrive at the 17-minute sweet spot. Or maybe they’re just pre-lipstick fans of The Cure and switched ‘seconds’ to ‘minutes’.
They don’t show a countdown clock so I’ll have to wing it a little but, hey, 17 minutes is plenty of time to complete the purchase.
Oh now it’s asking me for my full name, phone number, postal address, date of birth, star sign, shoe size, favourite colour and my 1990s Pornstar Name based on the name of my pet + the last thing I ate – all extremely important data when ordering digital tickets, I’m sure you agree. Incidentally, I hear that some people use the Pornstar Name thing as a way of devising new login passwords at work. A bloke down the pub told me his previous Pornstar Password was ‘Shithead Faggots’ – memorable, perhaps, but not a name to win the favours of a reader’s wife, I don’t think.
Even though I have filled out all this stuff, the CONTINUE button remains greyed out. This usually means there is a tickbox somewhere on the page that I have forgotten to tick, or untick. I’m never sure which as these usually refer to terms and conditions and what I call ‘optional options to pick options’ which are always full of ambiguous phrasing and treble negatives. You know, something along the lines of “Don’t not untick not to not receive no messages from carefully selected (ha ha) partners”.
There are four of these mandatory options (sic) with accompanying language-mangling paragraphs and I spend a while ticking and unticking them in various combinations until I land on the one that lights up the CONTINUE button at the bottom of the page.
How much time did that take, for heaven’s sake? How much do I have left from my 17 minutes? No idea. I decide to launch my phone’s Clock app and start a countdown from, er, let’s say 12 minutes. But when I return to the ticket booking site, it turns out my detour to another app has erased all the fields in the booking form. My thumbs are a blur as I race through and enter everything again from scratch, including all that ticking and unticking of mandatory options because I’ve forgotten the secret combination.
I tap CONTINUE.
It tells me that I have to register an account in order to book tickets.
It takes me to a registration page where I am asked to fill out my full name, phone number, postal address, date of birth, star sign, shoe size, favourite colour and my 1990s Pornstar Name. Yes, again. No worries, third time round it’s quicker to type and I still remember what options to tick at the bottom.
I tap REGISTER.
It tells me that it cannot register me because I have previously registered with them.
It takes me to a login page where I am told to enter my username and password, neither of which I know. This time, there is a link marked ‘Forgotten username or password?’ – which to my mind is the same as having a DON’T KNOW button but at a considerably less convenient moment in the booking process within whatever time I had left to complete the purchase. I do not risk checking my stopwatch app to find out the latter.
It tells me it has sent me an email verification that contains a one-time code to prove I am Tibbles ReadyBrek or whatever so that I can change my password.
The verification email, of course, does not arrive. Half a minute later, a ‘Send verification code again’ link reappears and I duly tap on it. I do this eight more times before a code turns up in my inbox.
I copy the code over but it has expired. I continue to tap on the ‘Send verification code again’ button every 30 seconds for… a while. Suddenly 15 verification emails turn up at once. I pick the one at the top and its code works. Hurrah! I’m in!
Well, I’m in as far as a page for devising a new password. This bit is easy. Like you, I am asked to invent new passwords about 17 times a day so I’ve really got the hang of doing this – even down to guessing what the minimum-maximum character limits are and what doesn’t count as a ‘special character’ purely based on the visual shitness factor of the password page template.
The site accepts my new password and duly kicks me back down to the initial login page. I log in with my renewed credentials. It has emptied the ticket booking from the basket for one reason or another: maybe my 17 minutes ran out, maybe the new login refreshed my cookie, maybe the UX designer of the website is simply a cunt, who knows?
Dread rising to my throat, I navigate back to the event page and tap on the BUY TICKETS button again. By good fortune, there are just four tickets left now, and I nab two of them. A fresh 17 minutes is assigned to me and I breeze through the confirmation pages, albeit with rising panic.
I tap PAY and enter my credit card details. 2FA sends a message to my bank’s app on my smartphone, asking if I want to approve the payment. I tap APPROVE.
A new window appears bearing the logo of my bank and containing the message: “Unable to approve purchase. You have not connected from this device recently. Please enter the verification code that we have emailed to you.”
Mme D has finished reading the newspaper – and a couple of chapters from a book she picked up while waiting for me to buy the tickets – and notices me crouched and whimpering in the corner of the room. She picks up her handset, calls the venue and books the tickets verbally, literally reading her credit card numbers aloud over the phone.
It takes 17 seconds.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He wonders whether whether UX designers could take their ‘customer funnels’ and kick them brutally up each other’s arses, thereby learning for themselves for the first time what their users actually experience.
there is not a circle of hell deep enough for the "designers" of these ticketing web sites...
I didn't know ATG were in France as well!