The Virtual Waiting Room: My Second Olympic Experience
On June 6, 2009 at 10:00am Pacific Daylight Time , the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games started phase 2 of their ticket sales. If you would like to know more about the ticketing process for Vancouver 2010, check it out here. For the rest of you here is a quick explanation: each ticketing phase represents a set of tickets that go on sale to the public. Phase 1 was done by an online lottery. In phase 2, the tickets were available through the website and the Vancouver 2010 Ticketing Center and through ticket booths in Vancouver in real time. Although I already have some tickets for the games, I decided that I would attempt to get some Team Canada hockey tickets.
The login to the ticketing section of the site was locked down until phase 2 officially started. When it opened, this is the screen that was displayed to me:
Your average person who is desperately trying to get tickets because they missed out on phase 1 might be exceptionally frustrated by this screen. Me, being a UX person (and already having a handful of tickets for some for the events), didn’t mind the experience of sitting around waiting and thus here I am writing about the experience.
The idea of a virtual waiting room is something that makes sense for high demand online events. If you are hosting a public webcast, but you know that your servers will only handle 10 000 users, setup a waiting room and put them in a queue. People can still browse around the web and continue to go about their business while waiting to enter your event.
That might sound like a lame user experience, but think of the alternative: the user attempts to enter, get denied, and have to continually refresh their browser until they get in, or until they give up. I don’t understand how that can even be considered a viable user experience for any web event. For the event host, all of the people that are “over capacity” are constantly hitting your server whenever they hit the refresh button. It doesn’t matter if they aren’t getting into the event, they are bombarding you with requests that your server needs to process, which slows down everything. On the other hand, the user has to sit at their machine hitting refresh, meaning they can’t do anything else but that with their computer.
With the virtual waiting room everyone wins. People virtually arrive at your event, if there is no room, they are sent to the waiting room. The waiting room doesn’t have to be a page with a nothing more than a message. You could give them proper feedback on where they are in the queue, you can prepare them for the event by displaying resources related to the evening. You can even give them access to your online store and give them a discount for being patient. There are countless things you can do with the virtual waiting room and keep your users on your site, even though they are unable to see your event right away. Even if they just want to wait until they are in the event, the user does not have to sit there refreshing their browser window. They can open up other tabs in their browser, or write a blog post about how they think the virtual waiting room is an underused and underappreciated UX tool. Now THAT is a user experience.
Well, I have been in the virtual waiting room for the past hour and I am about to give up and assume that all Team Canada hockey tickets have been secured by other people. Although I am disappointed that I was unable to get tickets, at least I was able to share my thoughts on user experience about the virtual waiting room while sitting in line attempting to get tickets.
Catch you on the flip side.
QUICK UPDATE:
I did manage to get into the site a while after completing the post here. Although I liked the use of the waiting, I must say that the site needed some work on the UX side of things. Still, I managed to get a couple of Team Canada hockey games, so I’m content enough.
Hello One Cure,
My apologies for the late reply. I somehow managed to miss that question. My blog is actually BlogEngine.NET and it is pretty easy to manage. Here is the link: http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/
For me though, I was able to go through my web host and they setup everything for me, but I did manage to set it up myself before deciding to go with it.
Anyway, to answer your question I think you could easily manage everything yourself. The management screens are pretty self explanatory, and give you plenty of flexibility.
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