KUALA LUMPUR (May 28): Digital Edge reached out to local thought leaders to get a better idea of just what went wrong with the recently concluded online registration for the AstraZeneca vaccine. 

The third round of online registrations opened at noon on Wednesday, May 26 and was roundly criticised by netizens for its poor user experience and unreliable data capture, among other issues. 

It is important however to note that at this juncture, there is no visibility of the back-end database architecture employed by the administrators of the vaksincovid.gov.my portal. Therefore, there are some limitations to being able to diagnose the root cause of all the problems that might have taken place on May 26.

As a general starting point, Innergia Labs chief technology officer Wayne Ch’ng says it is possible that website administrator did not anticipate the surge in online traffic over the roughly 90-minute window when registrations were taking place.

“As the website administrator, you choose the sizing of the virtual machines (servers), load balancer, and database for your website. 

“The selected sizing scales with the number of possible connections, so the "larger" the sizing, the higher the number of connections you can have.

“If you underestimate demand and the size of the infrastructure is insufficient, it will not be able to reliably handle the traffic, returning error messages to users, or in the worst case, nothing at all,” he points out.

"The right-sizing has to be applied at every level tier of the infrastructure stack or you risk introducing a bottleneck, which singularly will affect the total performance."

But even if this were the case, there was at least one key strategy that administrators could have adopted to both manage user expectations, as well as minimise surge – implement digital waiting rooms. 

According to Fave chief technology officer Arzumy Md, there was a great example of this in practice, on the exact same day as the vaccine registration, on the McDonald’s Malaysia website of all places.

“At 10am that day, Malaysia became the first country in Asia to launch its special McDonald’s-BTS set meal. It was a collaboration between the fast-food chain and the famous South Korean boyband. 

“As it turned out, the McDonald’s delivery website also experienced a surge in people registering to buy the meal. The website was temporarily down for the first 15 minutes or so. But things got back up and running very quickly. Overall UX was much better than the Covid vaccine registration, which opened for application about two hours later. 

“From what I can tell, McDonald’s adopted a different approach than the Covid vaccine registration website. Instead of trying to execute too many digital functions all at once, and from so many different users, the company simply implemented a digital ‘waiting room’. 

“When users clicked on the website, they were automatically redirected to this waiting room, and as soon as someone further up the digital line completed their purchase, the waiting room opened and allowed another user to begin purchasing the meal. 

“McDonald’s simply managed user expectations, and this alone would have drastically cut down on users’ propensity to continuously refresh the page, which ironically, would have made the problem worse.” 

A big problem with the vaccine registration website was that users were left frustrated at the lack of notice because tabs they were clicking on simply didn’t respond. The natural tendency would have been to refresh the page and reapply for the vaccine. 

This would have been the worst thing for a user to have done, Arzumy says, particularly since the website was already struggling with heavy traffic. 

“Imagine 10 people visit a website. Now if a website works as it’s supposed to, it will log 10 separate requests from these individuals. So the individuals enter the website, register their details and submit their application. This process takes place 10 times. 

“However, if the website is slow and unresponsive, people wouldn’t know if a button they clicked on was responding. Their immediate reaction is to refresh the page, which basically sends a new connection request to the website, thus increasing the website traffic. 

“Imagine this happening to the 10 people, and each of them refresh the page 10 times in total. The website is now having to deal with 100 connections – an exponential increase in website traffic. Now imagine this occurring on a national level, among millions of users, very many of whom would have refreshed their page multiple times. 

“You now have this really bad situation where everyone is unknowingly contributing to worsening online traffic. But it’s not the users’ fault, because they can’t be expected to know all this.”

When all is said and done however, Arzumy calls on people to look at the bigger picture. While there were indeed many problems with this third online vaccine registration, the fact that nearly a million slots were taken up in the space of about 90 minutes bodes well for the country’s vaccination programme. 

“Based on the information we have right now, it seems that nearly a million vaccine registrations were made that day. Assuming that number is true, then on this basis, the vaccination drive should be considered a success.”