Last week we had a few customers report to us that they had booked a time without receiving a confirmation email. There is no record of their booking in the system or export data so it is not clear for us what is happening. We think that it is unusual for several people to claim the same thing when every time that we tested the bookings system we couldn’t see any problems. But if the customer believes that they have booked a time then where could the confusion be?

We have experimented a little bit to try and understand what the problem could be and we’ve discovered that if the user does not select a time for the service or fill in all the required fields then the Bookings program just appears to reload the page instead of showing the validation errors on the screen. This is clearly a bug because the program used to show messages that guide the user on how to fill in the form correctly. For example if only one time slot is available for a day then it isn’t totally clear that the customer needs to click on this time, but the validation error messages would normally highlight this kind of problem for the customer. But now when you click the “book” without selecting a time you would just see the same booking page again. The customer never sees any confirmation message so this might explain why the customers think that they have booked a time with us. But the worry for us now is that we cannot possibly know how many people this problem has affected but it is currently about 4% of the bookings. We also don’t know when the validation messages stopped working either.

We can’t see that anybody else has reported this kind of problem but we’ve tried it on two separate Bookings sites and both sites have the same user experience at the moment. The user won’t see any validation errors if they fill out the form incorrectly and because the page reloads without a confirmation message the customer might believe that their booking was successful.

As a temporary measure we are trying to highlight through our own website that the user will receive a confirmation email if they have booked their time correctly and that missing details like selecting the time or missing one of the fields would result in their booking not being registered.

There is also an error in the console saying that the page failed to load a resource which may or may not be connected to this problem.

Hope that this problem gets fixed soon!

​Last week we had a few customers report to us that they had booked a time without receiving a confirmation email. There is no record of their booking in the system or export data so it is not clear for us what is happening. We think that it is unusual for several people to claim the same thing when every time that we tested the bookings system we couldn’t see any problems. But if the customer believes that they have booked a time then where could the confusion be?We have experimented a little bit to try and understand what the problem could be and we’ve discovered that if the user does not select a time for the service or fill in all the required fields then the Bookings program just appears to reload the page instead of showing the validation errors on the screen. This is clearly a bug because the program used to show messages that guide the user on how to fill in the form correctly. For example if only one time slot is available for a day then it isn’t totally clear that the customer needs to click on this time, but the validation error messages would normally highlight this kind of problem for the customer. But now when you click the “book” without selecting a time you would just see the same booking page again. The customer never sees any confirmation message so this might explain why the customers think that they have booked a time with us. But the worry for us now is that we cannot possibly know how many people this problem has affected but it is currently about 4% of the bookings. We also don’t know when the validation messages stopped working either.We can’t see that anybody else has reported this kind of problem but we’ve tried it on two separate Bookings sites and both sites have the same user experience at the moment. The user won’t see any validation errors if they fill out the form incorrectly and because the page reloads without a confirmation message the customer might believe that their booking was successful.As a temporary measure we are trying to highlight through our own website that the user will receive a confirmation email if they have booked their time correctly and that missing details like selecting the time or missing one of the fields would result in their booking not being registered.There is also an error in the console saying that the page failed to load a resource which may or may not be connected to this problem.Hope that this problem gets fixed soon!  Read More

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