Recently I decided to attend an industry event and went online to register for it. The organization running the event decided to use EventBrite for registration.

I started to register by clicking the link from the organization’s website. I was immediately directed to the EventBrite site. I could easily see that I had one choice for ticket type and I just needed to select the amount of tickets I wanted. I selected one and chose the order now button. Here is where things got tricky. I was asked if I wanted to pay using PayPal or, if I didn’t have a PayPal account, I could use a credit card. I do have a PayPal account; however I never use it and can’t remember the last time I logged in so I decided to just pay by credit card.

Simple enough right? No.  Instead it figured out that I had a PayPal account and asked me to login to use it. This was after I had completed the form and entered the credit card information I wanted to use. Now I was annoyed, but because I really wanted to go to the conference I decided I would play this game and use my PayPal account. Well, as I suspected all my information was out of date and the credit card on file was not active anymore. I thought ok, fine. I’ll update it.  But after I entered the card I wanted to use it told me another PayPal account was using that card and I could not. It became obvious at that point that my husband uses his PayPal account more than I do and had updated it. So I found another credit card to use which was rejected because I never use it and probably forgot to put the new one in my wallet when it came in the mail. So what am I supposed to do at this point? Well my last resort was to try to start over to see if it would let me register without PayPal.

So I tried to start over, but it turned out that EventBrite had saved the information I had entered and I couldn’t start over. It knew I had a PayPal account and it was determined to make me use it. I gave up and told my husband to go in with his PayPal account and to register for me.  And then, even after registering successfully, I got an email asking me to finish my original registration.

Why am I ranting? Is this just another site with usability problems? I think it’s a bigger and different issue. In this situation I was passed through 3 organizations, UPA, EventBrite and PayPal. It makes perfect sense from a business and user experience level that the UPA outsourced to EventBrite because it’s not worth it for them to build a system for this once a year event. Also many people are familiar with EventBrite so they know how to use it. It also makes sense that EventBrite’s services partner well with PayPal offerings and provide great value to the users. However by partnering and outsourcing all the organizations as a whole have created a completely new user experience.

The entire process from beginning to end needs to be considered and clearly this was not in this case. When I do projects I typically work with one client, on one product and collect data for them alone. But we have 3 companies here who have to work together. So whose job is it to fix the issues and consider the entire user experience?

Obviously UPA has no or little control over how EventBrite’s site works. PayPal has more control in that they are business partners and probably are involved in how they are represented on the EventBrite site, but even still I doubt they have any say in how EventBrite’s product works. So it seems that EventBrite is the company on the hook because they are the ones that are bringing it all together and without them neither UPA or PayPal would be able to accomplish anything.

Is it always that simple? Probably not, but it seems to me that if you can find the key partner, the one that everyone needs and change their product within the context of the other partners and what they bring to the user, then you are closer to being able to affect the entire experience for the better.