For years scalpers have been using bots to quickly purchase tickets before they are sold out. In turn, Ticketmaster and many other sites installed CAPTCHAs to determine if the ticket buyer is a human or a bot. CAPTCHAs can be difficult to decipher even for humans and have been annoying customers for years. Ticketmaster isn’t dropping puzzles altogether but rather moving to easier ones by Solve Media.
I’m assuming they are doing this because of customer feedback. I’m guessing they’ve got enough complaints over the years and they may even believe it’s affecting their bottom line. The customer in me appreciates this change as I no longer have to strain my eyes while translating obscure text.
The developer in me finds it even more interesting. This is a perfect example of UX and it also shows that you don’t always have to redesign an entire form to improve the user’s experience. Just replacing a difficult to solve CAPTCHA with a much simpler puzzle goes a long way.
I guess it’s a good thing to never be satisfied and always strive to make something better but I may be taking it too far. The more I looked at the last design, the more I felt it was too busy. This design is super simple. Still need to create the archive page and work out a few bugs though.
I’ve redesigned by blog again. There are many small style issues that still need to be addressed but overall I’m pretty happy with the layout and design. This version took me about 20 hours over the course of two months. I took a big step towards the future and embraced HTML5 more than I ever had in the past.
I’ve installed a blog on my website (duh, you are reading it). My goal is not to blog but rather to gain experience installing one. I’ll probably put significantly more hours into styling, coding, and whatever other cool things I can find than into blogging.
My name is Brian Mapes. I'm a father, husband, Phillies fan, Eagles fan, comic book lover, software engineer, technology lover, wannabe artist, and former MacRumors mod. These are my random thoughts.