While I'm in a complaining mood, Ster Kinekor.
My submission to their online complaints system:
The online booking system performs incredibly and unnecessarily poorly,
possibly only under load.
I tried to book tickets to Casino Royale last Saturday (2 December) and was
continually met with "System unavailable, retry?" errors. These would occur
every few seconds, even when I was not interacting with the system. I was
unable to complete the booking because there was insufficient time between
failures to enter the movie card numbers for my booking and a failure/retry
cleared the numbers I was entering.
While I have no knowledge of the system other than trying to use it, I believe
the client is continually contacting the server for some reason. All this
unnecessary traffic firstly puts load on the server leading to far more
frequent failures than would normally be the case and secondly leads to
spurious failures that do nothing more than interrupt the user experience and
(in my case at least) result in a lost booking.
All of the issues I have seen on the booking system are solved technical
problems. It remains only to implement the (in most cases) fairly simple
architectural and implementation changes.
I would like to recommend that Ster Kinekor hire some competent web application
engineers to rebuild the system rather than apparently relying on graphic
designers to come up with something flashy but barely functional.
I didn't pull any punches on this one. I'm tired of crap on the web.
The online booking system performs incredibly and unnecessarily poorly,
possibly only under load.
I tried to book tickets to Casino Royale last Saturday (2 December) and was
continually met with "System unavailable, retry?" errors. These would occur
every few seconds, even when I was not interacting with the system. I was
unable to complete the booking because there was insufficient time between
failures to enter the movie card numbers for my booking and a failure/retry
cleared the numbers I was entering.
While I have no knowledge of the system other than trying to use it, I believe
the client is continually contacting the server for some reason. All this
unnecessary traffic firstly puts load on the server leading to far more
frequent failures than would normally be the case and secondly leads to
spurious failures that do nothing more than interrupt the user experience and
(in my case at least) result in a lost booking.
All of the issues I have seen on the booking system are solved technical
problems. It remains only to implement the (in most cases) fairly simple
architectural and implementation changes.
I would like to recommend that Ster Kinekor hire some competent web application
engineers to rebuild the system rather than apparently relying on graphic
designers to come up with something flashy but barely functional.
I didn't pull any punches on this one. I'm tired of crap on the web.