Frequent Traveler Awards / Voting Interface Problems
 

Hi Randy:

I raise this here because FT is listed as a sponsor / backer of the Frequent Traveler Awards, which Hilton HHonors urged me to participate in by sending me an email. I sure tried.

The drag-and-drop interface respondents use to select and rank their favorite programs is completely faulty. The user is given a nominees' list on the left side of the screen and a black column on the right; we're supposed to drag our favorites from left to right, then manipulate the right-side selections until they're in the 1-to-4 order we want, then hit submit. When the user mouses over a nominee, a large explanatory popover appears.

Frequently, I found, a nominee on the left couldn't be dragged to the right. When it could, it would mysteriously appear twice -- "doubled." Try to drag one back to the left side, back where it came from, and it would disappear altogether. The caption popovers are big and intrusive and obscure the primary interface, so you can't see what you're doing. Selections on the right side could not be re-ordered, so it was impossible to stack favorites in 1-ot-4 order. And hitting page reload or "back" buttons did nothing to clean things up or reset the ballot screen.

I finally submitted my selections after wrestling with the interface for many long minutes, but I can tell you they were wholly scrambled and not representative of the votes I wanted to cast, and I think the system must be receiving a lot of scrambled, suspect data or incomplete ballots.

The irony is, for a simple stack-rank voting exercise, this is so simple an interface to pull off with clickable buttons... but someone got fancy, or tried to, with Flash and popovers and so on, and the result is a usability (and data-corruption) nightmare. Any travel provider who doesn't win recognition will be able to point to this interface and say: Well, maybe we DID win. Who knows, with this drag-and-drop deal malfunctioning like this? Goodness knows more than one provider I tried to vote for won't show up on my "ballot."

I hate to see you and FT associated with an exercise that's designed so poorly and I fear will yield very random results that deserve our skepticism.

As the President of the Frequent Traveler Awards, I can answer this.

Internet Brands, the owners of Flyertalk are responsible for delivering the voting site and software, so the voting process you just went to is run by the owners of Flyertalk.

We are aware of this problem, which a very small percentage has had, and IB are working on it to get this worked out.

Please report errors here and Dick will follow up

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/techn...er-awards.html

Then this shouldn't surprise us, should it!? :D

Another thing is, why cant I vote for U.S. based programs when I am located in Europe and vv? I think this is influencing the results in a bad way, not many people would vote for FlyingPoo or LH Miles&More due to their high fees on awards yet they dont have much choice. Why didn't you guys implement some innovation instead of using the same old system? :confused:

Thanks for your efforts though! Anyway I hope it's an honest and clear process without collaborating shadow deals in the background. :o

Cheers!

He he... In their defense, launching a database that has hundreds of thousands of voters in very few hours, we were expecting some issues. This is a minor one and we expect they will have it fixed on Monday.

So who are taking over after the Freddies? Well, we are all Flyertalkers and have known Randy and the community for years. The group is well known through blogging, moderation on Flyertalk and in the press. The members are:

Management and Fundraising Committee
tommy777
oliver2002
xyzzy

Award Nominations Committee

gleff
sbm12
thezipper
Canarsie
rcs85551
MileageAddict

We knew that many for profit marketing companies were ready to pick up where the Freddies left of and we wanted the spirit of Randy's and Karen's remarkable work live on in a for non profit organization run by frequent flyers for frequent flyers.

As for the voting process and the nomination, it has changed dramatically compared to the Freddies. The Nomination Committee lead by Gleff, has spent hundreds of hours to put together the structure we have now. We knew that 80% of the voters the first year would be located in North America. That Delta Airlines won awards in Europe the last year, we found very strange. Face it, very very few people are like us that has a stack of elite cards in their pocket from all over the world. Most Europeans are members of the European programs and we wanted them to have a chance to win within their region and not have hundreds of thousands of Americans decide that their North American favorites should win among the European. Gleff will be able to elaborate. Trust me, it has been a VERY long, heated debate.

Anyways, I hope that clears things up a bit.

Thanks

Guys, I mean no disrespect as I know an enormous amount of time and effort has gone into building this venture. This just adds to my frustration. The website is cack, to put it bluntly. Bizarrely, it does not acknowledge many members are travelling and may wish to cast their votes using their iDevice.

Using Firefox 3.6.10, Mac OS X 10.6.4, my experience echos that described by BearX220 above.

We are aware of this and the voting site doesn't support it. Please post your feedback in the other thread so IB can record it and get it fixed

In case you were wondering about the link to the other thread:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/techn...er-awards.html

Using IE9 beta and am having the same problems. No drag & drop capabilities at all.

IB is deeply irresponsible to take a busted interface like this live in so critical a context. I wouldn't hire IB to sort my socks for me.

Thanks for the post. Actually i have nothing to do with this and as well was not consulted with for any advice regarding the voting process, etc. The only awards that I have been associated with are the Freddie Awards.

From what I have heard and as noted here, Internet Brands is responsible for the voting technology and it looks like this might be better served in the Technical Issues forum.

I've tried to cast my votes in the first three categories (Region 2, Europe/Africa) using Firefox and Safari on two different Macs running different versions of Shockwave Flash (as listed below). Both behave differently but the problem of nominee duplication presents itself in various forms on both systems. The major stalling point relates to duplicate nominees which once stacked in the right hand column it is near impossible to control the ranking. For example if I rank my first choice at the top of the stack, its dupe will take position no 2, relegating my intended second choice into third position. Refreshing the screen does not reset the ballot.

Anyway, I'm sure IB will come up with a solution in due course, so I will hold off submitting my votes until we hear back from IB with a conclusive resolution.



System 1a: Mac OS X 10.6.4/Firefox 3.6.10/Flash 10.1.82.76
System 1b: Mac OS X 10.6.4/Safari 5.0.2/Flash 10.1 r82
System 2a: Mac OS X 10.4.11/Firefox 3.6.3/Flash 10.0.32.18
System 2b: Mac OS X 10.4.11/Safari 4.0.5/Flash 10.0 r32

Wonder if this new acquisition will affect the development of the voting site (and/or FT)?

Internet Brands Acquired

All,

IB has located the error today and after having the site down for about an hour, the voting site is now working properly.

The data has been analyzed and the back end has disqualified all duplicates, so the data is 100% accutate.

Please note that the number of voters that got this error was negligible and it has absolutely no effect on the votes as the people who click out before finishing will automatically be disqualified (if you save and come back later, your vote will count, but only after you complete the voting). If you got the double entry, the second vote was disqualified. There's another minor bug, IB is testing, but we haven't been able to duplicate the error. It has only been a handful of people who has reported this error, IB is looking, but it shouldn't affect anyone

The voting site is now up and running, we are of course running our own tests, it looks fine this far.

If you find any other errors, pls post in this thread.

Thank you all for your patience and support:)

We have fixed the duplicate items issue. If you load up the page, it should remember where you left off and you can continue voting. If you still see duplicate entries on the right hand side, make a change you your votes and the duplicates will disappear.

We are aware of a couple of other bugs that are affecting a small percentage of users, and we are working to get them resolved.

The acquisition will not affect the development of the voting site in any way.

Then I'd have to say your program seems to start off with a bias, after all, you are saying you "wanted them to have a chance to win within their region." And to do so seems to indicate you would have to purposely delist others from the opportunity. In the Freddies, it wasn't about volume, but value and open to all who serve the area ... not who just have a headquarters there. Delta likely won it because for those members living and/or voting from the european sector felt that the value of the program to their individual needs was better served by that airline program vs. the others. Fact is that hundreds of thousands of Americans likely did not decide that win for Delta since in doing so they delisted their own ability to vote in the North America sector (you could only vote from one sector). More likely europeans voted it along as well as perhaps any expats, but expats exist heavily in all markets and all programs.

I hope you're not setting this up with your own winners as a comparison and if so, then you better get ready for when winners don't exactly look like your own choices. For the Freddies, the masses always decided and while i may have scratched my own head from time to time, I never put in harms way anything regarding a winners honor.

My comments are intended only to defend the voters of the Freddies. The public is not to be dammed.