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UPDATE - 19 February 2012
The design museum have now added support for members to purchase tickets online, this was done late last year but I didn’t think to update this post until I saw it in my archives. I was actually in the Design Museum recently and speaking to someone about changing my address, after I said my email, he said “You wrote about the members ticketing process didn’t you?”. I’m glad it helped push them along to support members purchasing tickets online (and hopefully didn’t bother them too much).
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Yesterday I received an email from the Design Museum about an upcoming talk with Bill Moggridge. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Bill, here is a little snippet from his wikipedia page…
William (Bill) Moggridge, a British industrial and interaction designer, is co-founder of the Silicon Valley-based design firm IDEO and the current director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. He helped design what was arguably the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass.
Understandably, I was rather excited about the opportunity to hear Bill speak so I tried to purchase tickets. The email itself only included the Design Museum’s email and phone number.
Usually the Design Museum lists details of talks on their website and I faintly remembered having purchased tickets online before, so I headed over to their talks page to see whether that was still the case.
Unfortunately when I clicked on the Ticketweb link, the only tickets they had available were the full price tickets at £15, there was no option to specify that you were actually a member and entitled to the discounted ticket price. I wasn’t sure whether there would be anyone in the office today, so I thought I’d drop them an email to ask how I can purchase tickets and this is the response I got back…
If I want to book tickets, I need to supply my debit or credit card details and/or contact them during office hours. As a general rule, email isn’t a secure way of transferring information like debit or credit card details so I would hope they aren’t encouraging people to do this.
The option now is to ring them during office hours, although what office hours actually means certainly differs depending who you talk to, the email gives no clue to when I should contact the museum to book my ticket. Instead of replying at all, they could have phoned me using the member details on their file. Instead, I’ll have to give them a call on Monday afternoon when I have a free moment, in the hope there is actually some tickets left.
Given that members are clearly committed to supporting the Design Museum, it seems a little strange to give non-members an easier way to purchase tickets. Adding in the ability to purchase members tickets online — with the caveat that a membership card is needed for entry — seems relatively straightforward from a technical perspective and I can’t fathom why they aren’t doing this.
