Edinburgh fringe barely able to sell tickets

Edfringe has has bad IT, for as long as it's had IT.

Now, all tickets are done as QR codes. Good choice. Except the app requires a working internet connection, to display the ticket for the next show.


It obvious to anyone but an IT specialist that the app should cache tickets including QR codes. Since showing your ticket at the door is an important and time-critical, um, user journey, nice app design might even ask the question of how to have this QR + basic details for next show as to-hand as possible.  It could be always displayed when in the app, or displayed on the app's main screen and most of its other screens. Could you even get a qr into a badge on the phone's home screen? If not, then a home screen widget would be possible. How many squares? Maybe 4.

Instead of which, we have "you need an internet connection" at the door, or no ticket, no qr, no show.

As time went on, we realised more and more was being loaded over the internet. There would be big white empty rectangles during extended hangings. Pixmaps, the pictures in the GUI, were being loaded over the internet. Later, it became clear that the very GUI itself, form layouts and buttons, were also loaded over the internet, leading to even weirder blanks during operation.

The likely excuse for this, apparently, is that the app is "just a version of the web site". This is why everyone except IT specialists can see that the app's design is shit. Whereas IT specialists think A just being a version of B is great, even if A and B are both shit.


The button to be in the grey box above never appeared. This shouldn't happen.




I'm a bin.

Meanwhile, attempts to pay hanged indefinitely, emails about failed purchases were generated, SMS codes were diligently transcribed, and eventually one of the purchases went thru. A friend reports the edfringe web site wasn't making much sense for all of yesterday.

I dug out an old edfringe account from 2009. Its password was something like "edfringeboxofficeRshite".

I'd rather just read a book at this point.


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