Comments on: It’s Been a Tough Start to the New Year at ALA….

By: Lois

Lois — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:02:53 +0000

I probably will not be going to ALA in Chicago because of the change in housing registration. For many years I have gotten my hotel registration very early and decided by the end of early registration for the conference if I was actually going (very rarely have I canceled a room reservation) I had a change in employment last year, and I’m not ready to commit to attending, and certainly don’t want to commit my money without knowing I will have an acceptable place to stay (acceptable based on my personal requirements of price and limited walking)

By: Jenny

Jenny — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:05:37 +0000

I don’t feel qualified to respond to your comments about registration, because I don’t work with that service, but we’re still looking at what happened and putting together more detailed explanations, so I’ll post a link to all of that when it’s available.

I can respond to Jessamyn’s comment since that’s my area, and say yeah, we understand what you’re saying. That’s why our plan is to bring the event planner into Connect, which will give us more control over it. (Tangent: it’s my hope to create a new Drupal module that we can release back to the community, similar to what we’re doing with the iMIS–>Drupal engine.)

Two immediate outcomes for doing this will be to 1) put it on a platform that’s designed to be cross-browser, and 2) use the work we’ve done to allow authentication via iMIS (meaning you can use your ALA website login and password). That will remove the need to give everyone a new password to begin with, since our ultimate goal is to reduce the number of logins members have to maintain.

We’ll be soliciting additional feedback about desired functionality, but the best place to probably track this whole project will be the ITTS Update blog since this will become an ITTS + WAC project. We hope everyone will participate in that discussion.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:16:02 +0000

The password issue on the event planner has really been with us for years now. I’m not sure why this has been allowed to continue. In *2005* I signed up as Keith Michael-Fiels. This year I signed in as Mary Ghikas. At some level if membership can’t be on board with getting a password emailed to them, it may be time for ALA to be a tech leader and decide that

1. it’s more important to have a secure event planner than appease lowest common denominator confused people, combined with
2. providing the resources for confused people to get the help that they need either via phone or email in a speedy fashion.

I work with confused people all the time. I feel like showing them by example how a good website works helps them get more comfortable with technology in a way that actually helps their future learning on the topic. Show them a website with the password written right on it and they have no idea that this is NOT how a website should behave [and if fact one shoudl run screaming from such a website in a normal situation]. If we’re working with novices we have a special responsibility to show them how it’s done right, not just throw up our hands in a “hey it works!” fashion.

This goes double for the IE banner, there’s really no excuse for someone not catching that and saying “hey this is alienating to Mac users and you shoudln’t be optimizing a site for IE in 2009″ and I notice the banner is still there, so um, is that changing?

By: Mike Poulin

Mike Poulin — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:20:30 +0000

I must admit that there did seem to be something wrong with the housing registration as I registered during the first hour it was open and there were numerous hotels which were already sold out. That seemed unlikely unless someone was being allowed to make reservations prior to the opening.

By: cathy

cathy — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:36:39 +0000

I was online, right at 9am EST, ready to go. I had some very specific room and location and price requirements. Of course, I did not know that the open time had changed. I wasted almost the whole 2 hours trying to figure out what was wrong. I checked back to the ALA MW 2009 web site several times, looking for news. NADA. Finally, I see the new start time. But, once the new start time starts, the connection is so slow that all the hotels that fit my requirements were filled. I had to pick a hotel in a hurry cause I know that rooms fill up fast. It is more $$ and farther away than what I wanted/needed.

My school has very little professional development money so I am paying for ALA out of my own pocket. This screw up is costing me and my family money and makes my life in Chicago harder cause I have longer to walk.

Please, please try to do better for MW 2010.

By: Pat Banach

Pat Banach — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:38:01 +0000

I have not had good experiences with Experient in the past. Trying to make any kind of reservation change with them, such as adding or dropping a roommate, is a nightmare. Is there no other service you can use?

By: sam

sam — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:27:34 +0000

I would like to be optimistic that the issues with registering for housing at ALA will be improved in the future; however I have encountered technical problems, particularly extremely slow and unresponsive servers for at least the past four consecutive ALA conference housing registrations (and probably more than that). Experient needs to improve its technical service, increase its server capacity, and be adequately staffed and prepared for the barrage of housing registrations which they will receive shortly after registration opens (as those of us who have been attending for years have learned that you must make your reservation immediately if you want your first choice of hotel). I also have resorted to using the telephone for the past 2 ALA hotel reservations, due to difficulties with the online form, which would be my preferred method. ALA has contracted with Experient for years, and these problems are not unique this latest cycle of housing registrations; I wish ALA could leverage its resources to require Experient to offer us better service, or find an alternate contractor who can better meet our needs.

By: Jenny Levine

Jenny Levine — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:08:13 +0000

Thanks, Rudy. We're still figuring out what went wrong, but one piece of it appears to be the bundled registration option. I can tell you that we had staff testing the forms before registration opened, but having 4,000 people hit the site at once, most of whom were bundle registration users, caused problems with the software. That's why these problems didn't happen last time, as this option was new. Obviously we'll be doing a different type of testing next time. Like I said, though, we're still investigating what happened, and we'll do another post when we have better information. Regarding the "moving from page to page issue," we had some problems last month that we discussed in a post on ITTS Update. We thought those issues had been resolved, so can you contact me at jlevine@ala.org if you're still encountering them (outside of trying to register for Annual)? Again, though, we're really sorry this was such a frustrating experience. Thanks for taking the time to comment.

By: rudy

rudy — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:41:00 +0000

ALA, thanks for owning up to the tech problems. I will say that the frustration I experienced with registering for Annual was just yet one more problem with the ALA website. I don’t know why a problem is allowed to persist for over three months, but the inability and frustration of trying to get from ALA.org to any other page on the site — hanging up, spinning, limboing — is really intolerable. ESPECIALLY because it is usually happening in an interaction that will end with me giving you way too much money for the time you spent me and the aggravation caused.