Good grief, people
Look, I get that the Gencon Oz scheduling/rego system is different to that of standard Australian cons. But you know what? It's really not that difficult. In fact, some ridiculous number of people manage to use exactly the same system, with something on the order of a hundred times as many events to look at, every year for Gencon Indy
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Comments 15
I don't need to compare to other convention registration systems to take issue with how Gencon Oz handles this. In my professional career, I have built better online shopping systems, and there is absolutely no reason why an improved user experience would impact on the organisers in any way (unless you count the software developers as organisers, in which case those particular organisers have to learn better practices to get the job done better).
The fact that Gencon Indy uses the system just means that Gencon Indy can improve too.
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"there is absolutely no reason why an improved user experience would impact on the organisers in any way" ... except financially. Which is probably the single most important reason. I'm not privy to the con's finances, but I'm willing to bet that if Gencon Oz runs at a big loss for even one year, there won't be a Gencon Oz the year after. That means that any cost of development needs be recouped pretty much in the same year ... and I'd be very surprised if enhancing the rego system would do that.
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Usually, good developers aren't that much more expensive than bad ones. A good system takes about the same amount of time and effort to write as a bad one. The trick is to get the system right the first time. It's when you have to pay development costs all over again that the costs soar.
And when any business contracts the lowest bidder to do the work, and present their customers with a shoddy product as a result, you'll get complaints. "We can't afford better," rarely generates sympathy.
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Here is a system which does not exist, except as the vague and emotive complaints of the intarwebs: developing it will suck up scarce company resources in both time and money, and provide no guarantee of any kind of return ... and some people will run around yelling that the sky is falling when they have to use it.
It's not about sympathy, it's about reality. And the reality is that the rego system isn't likely to change without a strong business argument to support it. "The rego system suxx0rz" ain't it.
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I suspect, good sir, that as a regular Gen Con attendee you might have a different viewpoint here.
Without contrasting it to any other registration system, GenCon's system fails two particular tests very badly:
Maybe it's because my brain is comparing to other registration systems, but I find that the way it organises information is non-intuitive and painful.
That being said, I still don't think it's a reason not to go to GenCon, and that it's still useable.
I just don't think it does a good job of being useable. It's not as intuitive or seamless as it could be. So there's a potential business case there in lost market due to frustration/lost registrations for individual events, but it would be difficult to attach a $$$ figure to that, and I suspect that with GenCon's small development team, it's unlikely to get the revamp it could use.
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Select day(s), select event type(s), select ordering method, click "continue".
Can I quickly jump from the scheduling for a particular event to it's blurb?
Click on the name of the event.
Unless there's an aspect of these two tests I'm missing (and there could be), the rego system seems to pass them just fine?
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Select day(s), select event type(s), select ordering method, click "continue".
Get back results 10 at a time, requiring jumping back and forth between half a dozen pages to see all the information. Best practices would dictate that the user should at least have an option to set the number of results on a page (and I couldn't see such an option). I resorted to typing the results into Excel in my attempts to figure out what I could play when.
There's a very good chance that Gencon Oz will lose a certain amount of my business next year due to failure to make this easy to use. I generally attend every available session of every con I can get to, but Gencon Oz makes it hard enough to do this that I almost didn't bother this year. If there are others who feel like me, the impact may become significant.
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While it would be nice to see more results on a page - or to set the number you want to see, including "all", I personally don't see this as a major shortcoming. To me, it's a fairly minor issue, especially when you sort by game start date, so events are in the order that they happen, anyway.
The fact of the matter is that the sheer number and variety of events that Gencon Oz is providing makes scheduling more complicated. The current system, to my mind, does an adequate - though imperfect - job of supporting that complexity.
Reasoned, rational feedback - like your suggestion about returned results - is great, and I encourage people to offer it to Gencon Oz. Maybe they are, somewhere. But they sure aren't doing it in the Gencon Oz Feedback Forum.
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It would make a huge difference and it isn't hard to do.
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