Minor Irritants: Badly designed apps

Matt Gurney argues that if Ticketmaster or Air Canada and Aeroplan could make an app that worked as well as Netflix, this column would be about something else.

Every Christmas, when The Line takes a brief vacation, we like to offer what we call our Gratitude Series — we get some writers we love to share a story of something they’re happy about or grateful for from the past year. It’s a nice corrective to the usual doom-and-gloom. But, as we take a week off to start the summer, to hell with that — for your enjoyment, we’re leaning the opposite way: It’s The Line’s first Minor Irritants Week. Feel our pain. Share our pain. And never fear — The Line will be back next week.

By: Matt Gurney

Everybody hates technology. That’ll be a fairly common theme in this Minor Irritants series, including mine: I spend too much of my life navigating back and forth between apps and websites owned by the same company, that are supposed to be working together. I cannot fathom how there can be this much dysfunction within the same company’s IT system.

Let me give two specific examples of this problem. Hands down, the worst customer experience I’ve ever had with a major company’s online services is with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster, and many venues, basically insist that the only valid ticket is an electronic ticket, saved to your phone and scanned at the entry gate. You’d think, along with this insistence, they’d have figured out how to make the experience reasonably painless — that is, after all, the point of switching to mobile tickets, right?

No such luck.

Here’s a typical Ticketmaster experience for me. I open the app on my phone. It says I need to sign in again. It then opens a browser window on my phone — you can’t sign in directly through the phone app; you’ve got to use your web browser on your phone. But, since it’s not my default web browser that gets opened, my password and username won’t auto-fill. So I input them manually. And about 75 per cent of the time, it won’t recognize my password. It’s not user error. It’s that the website routinely seems to have problems validating a password. When this happens, typically I try a few times and then just give up and do a “Forgot Password” reset.

That works. Once I go through those steps and input a new password, I’m now logged into my account on the website, on the phone. But for some reason, the app, which directed me to that website in the first place, doesn’t always recognize that. So I have to go back to the app, try to log in again, a browser window opens again, and sometimes, since I just recently logged in with my new password, that works.

But not always. Sometimes I need to repeat the above process a few times.

Eventually, I get in via the app. This is usually good news — once I’m in the app, I’m usually able to buy the tickets I want and then download them successfully onto my phone.

But. Sometimes I already bought the tickets on my computer, or got sent tickets from someone else. If that happens, whoo boy.

Here’s how that works: I go through the nightmare step of repeatedly changing my password in the little browser window until, finally, the app lets me get into my account. But my new tickets don’t show up in my account on the app. There is nothing whatsoever under “upcoming events.” All my past events are there, so I know it’s the right account, but the new tickets don’t exist in the app. They do exist on the website. But the app is oblivious.

Over the years, I’ve found the only way to solve this problem is to sign out of the app and then sign back in. This doesn’t always work, but if you keep it up enough, it’ll work eventually. But! Every step in the signing out and then signing back in repeats the nightmare above. I think my record for new passwords just to get one pair of tickets onto my phone is five.

You know what the really wild part is? Sometimes none of this happens. Sometimes it works fine, and I think to myself, well, finally. They fixed whatever the problem was. They must have gotten enough complaints and they, at last, solved this.

And then I try it again the next time, and, nope. It’s still totally borked.

This is maddening, and it’s costing Ticketmaster money. I’ve never had a problem on StubHub, a third-party reselling site. You buy a ticket, you get a download link to your email that you can click on your phone, and it downloads when you click that link. It’s a vastly better system, and I’ll pay more there to avoid Ticketmaster’s dysfunction.

So that’s bad. There’s another company that’s almost as bad, though, and it’s one I’ve been grappling with recently: Air Canada and the points program, Aeroplan. The phone app for both is combined. But you have to sign into them separately. Each one also requires a web browser sign-in window — you can’t sign in directly via the app. Signing into one does not sign you into the other, so you have to do it twice. Neither password will auto-fill. The passwords do work — it doesn’t have the Ticketmaster problem. But it has a different problem: the app just routinely freezes and I need to force a shutdown. And start over.

The Air Canada/Aeroplan websites are bizarrely slow, but on a computer, they’re stable and functional, if pokey. But the app, which you have to use on your phone? Nightmare.

It doesn’t have to be this bad. I have lots of apps on my phone. This includes banking apps, email apps, social media apps, and secure messaging apps. And you want to know what they all have in common? They work. Sign-in is simple. Passwords are effectively saved and remembered. No separate browser windows are required. Multi-factor verification adds a few seconds of time, but works smoothly.

Hell, even my entertainment apps work seamlessly. If Air Canada or Ticketmaster could build an app as reliable and user-friendly as, say, Netflix, this would have been a much shorter column. (Or it would have been about something else.)

Air Canada is a pretty big company. Ticketmaster is a pretty big company. The apps aren’t doing particularly complex tasks that other apps haven’t figured out. They’re just awful at it.

This is a problem that can be fixed. It’s a minor irritant, I know, but it’s one that could just go away, and we’d all be better off for it.

Please, Ticketmaster. And please, Air Canada. Make the pain stop. Fix your apps.

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