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The new VirginAmerica.com
- __matt 12y agoI should fly somewhere
- kposehn 12y agoThis is slick. Virgin has been my favorite airline for some time, but now just went up 3.14 notches.
- jksmith 12y agoNow if they could make some more money and expand to other airports.
- swalsh 12y agoI love that the default city is based on location.
- aneisf 12y agoI don't think it is. I'm in St. Louis and the default is San Francisco.
- sehr 12y agosame here in austin
- smackfu 12y agoI'm in Connecticut and it defaults to Orlando instead of Boston. Odd that other people are seeing a different default.
- jrockway 12y agoI'm in New York and it defaulted to New York.
- gdewilde 12y agoI'm in the Netherlands, it defaults to freezing the firefox.
- swalsh 12y agomy guess is it defaults to the closest city that they have flights from. I don't think virgin flies from connecticut.
- smackfu 12y agoYeah, they fly from Boston and New York. But maybe this system doesn't have location services enabled, so it just picked something random.
- rafekett 12y agodefaults to SF for me. closest airport to me on their list is IAD, but it is ~6 hours away.
- josephjrobison 12y agoLooks sexy I dig it. Good use of Vine embedding, and the pocket pass is something I would use.
- aneisf 12y agoI love this. The boarding pass design is a nice touch, although I still feel like I'm going to fold it in a hurry to get it out of my hands and not in the way they intend.
- vinceguidry 12y agoWhen I saw their new boarding pass I just had to laugh. Someone awhile back went and redesigned Delta's boarding pass[1] and got a lot of crap over it for not taking into account why the boarding pass was the way it was.[2][3] But apparently someone at Virgin was taking notes. [1] http://passfail.squarespace.com/ http://passfail.squarespace.com/ [2] http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-pass-redesign http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-p... [3] http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-like/ http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-...
- culturestate 12y agoThere's a critical difference here; those redesigns are for boarding passes issued at the airport, while Virgin's are printed at home. You can get away with a lot when your common target equipment is an inkjet rather than a thermal printer.
- sdm 12y agoWhy would you need to print them at all? Does Virgin not support electronic boarding passes?
- culturestate 12y agoThere are still millions of people who don't have smartphones [1], for one. I'd imagine that there's a nontrivial overlap between that group and people who fly. 1. https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/2/comScore_Reports_December_2013_US_Smartphone_Subscriber_Market_Share https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/2/comS...
- madeofpalk 12y agoEh. There's like a bajillion bording pass redesigns, all with varing degrees of execution.
- yitchelle 12y agoanother discussion on boarding pass redesign. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6292273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6292273
- rwc 12y agoLooks slick, but felt like the actual booking process was extraordinarily disorienting. Too much movement and jumping around.
- papa_bear 12y agoAgreed. Maybe it's better on a touchscreen than existing interfaces, but changing the dates for my flight to check price difference was a huge pain. I'll be sticking with google's flight search.
- ericcholis 12y agoJust did a sample booking, and was very impressed. Some notes: 1) Some elements seem too far apart on a wider screen. Usual victim of responsive design without a max width. 2) The loading between steps is damn snappy, but feels slow sometimes due to the lack of an activity indicator. Slow is a relative term, but I instantly felt like I had done something wrong or the page wasn't responding.
- laoba 12y agoJust one quirk with the home page. Read down to the bottom, and then I tried to scroll back up, and it would stop at each "Section" and would not let me just continue scrolling up. OSX Firefox 29.0.1
- tnorthcutt 12y ago1. Click show more dates 2. See more dates, but not enough 3. Click show more dates 4. See more dates, but not enough 5. Click show more dates 6. Nothing happens 7. Click show more dates 8. Nothing happens 9. Give up
- malloreon 12y agoThe new boarding pass design is fantastic. Every airline needs to do at least that part immediately.
- jperras 12y agoThere was a post a few years ago that detailed many of the archaic and somewhat obscure requirements that boarding passes must have: http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-pass-redesign http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-p... It seems as though Virgin America can bypass many of these because there are no (?) international flights. The original boarding pass redesign post, to which the above was a rebuttal: http://passfail.squarespace.com/ http://passfail.squarespace.com/ Edit: wrong links.
- edgarvaldes 12y agoThere are 3 flights from mexican cities: Cancun, Los Cabos and Puerto Vallarta.
- olegbl 12y agoI believe Virgin partners with other airlines for all their international flights. Like, "Air Tahiti Nui operated by Virgin".
- qqg3 12y agoNo, they bypassed it because that is the print-at-home boarding pass design...
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- sdm 12y agoI don't get this. Don't they offer electronic boarding passes? Why would you need to print a boarding pass?
- jrnkntl 12y agoLink to the new version: https://beta.virginamerica.com/ https://beta.virginamerica.com/
- mattangriffel 12y agoVirginAmerica, you can't brag about your site's responsive design and then tell me I have to turn my phone to Portrait mode when I'm in Landscape.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- utopkara 12y agoBest scrolling experience I've seen in sites like this. It might not be right for all sites, but I would like to see it almost everywhere from now on.
- mden 12y agoWhy? I find it absolutely horrendous personally and would avoid any webpage that used it (got to the end of the presentation on my second try as I literally rage quit the first time). Some reasons as to why I severely dislike it: 1) When it scrolls the background changes color. There's multiple transitions going on. It's sort of like going to a different website. I lose my entire concentration and interest. 2) No scroll bar. I can't get to the final slide without painfully going slide by slide. 3) When scrolling with the mouse, I lose control of the webpage for about a second. I can keep spinning the mouse wheel but nothing is happening. It's infuriating.
- utopkara 12y agoI should have clarified what I meant by "sites like this". I was referring to sites which have multiple pages that are presented as a scrollable single page. Without a way to jump pages at proper page boundaries it becomes a pain to read through them. I still hope that this becomes the norm for scrolling through sites like this one.
- periferral 12y agoYou've gotta be kidding. everything mden said
- smackfu 12y agoIt's very linear and seems to work well only if you have all the dates completely locked down. I really prefer the designs that make it easy to see if travelling a day earlier or later would be much cheaper. I think the other Virgin sites do this.
- patrickfl 12y agoI am really liking this design and HTML is so clean. Anyone know what the breakdown of this stack is? A lot of the illustrations are SVG how are they animated?
- patrickaljord 12y agoPretty cool to see it's using AngularJS.
- smrtinsert 12y agoThis ui is ridiculous. It honestly feels like a parody.
- vinhboy 12y agoDid anyone else notice the adult humour on the first slide. Ha! Well done.
- smrtinsert 12y agoThis is good time to mention that scrolling is the bane of all things usable, and the person who invented it should be shot. If I wanted to lose context of my operations I would hire some guy to scream in my ear every few seconds, it would be less annoying. Scrolling uis clearly tailored to touch devices like this one really should be an available alternative, not the only interface.
- ethanbond 12y agoWow. Are you kidding? "Scrolling" is the bane of all things usable? Short of clicking on things, scrolling is probably the single most familiar and universal interaction on any computer of any form factor. Not sure how scrolling necessitates loss of context nor how not-scrolling maintains context. The two are causally unrelated.
- carlitobklyn 12y agoI think he/she is referring to the fact that the site scrolls for you (i.e. scroll hijacking), not the action of scrolling (by users). When a site scrolls for you, it can cause you to lose context (as what you just did is no longer on the page). I feel like a more apt term might be slideshow design?
- tommy_mcclung 12y agoWould have been great, except for it suffers from the same problem the existing VA site suffers from. Almost every time I use the VA site, "something goes wrong". I just tried to book tickets for next week, got all the way to the end to pay, hit submit and "something went wrong". They just put a pretty front end on a broken booking system that breaks almost every time I use the site. The only thing I care about is that it works and the VA site consistently fails, this upgrade doesn't fix the core problem I've always had with it.
- jeroen 12y agoSomething is broken. I get grey backgrounds and grey text when scrolling down. Selecting text makes the correct colors show up. The background images further down the site are missing. After reloading the page, I now get text in the same color as the background. And the down arrows are missing. This all happens in Safari. WFM in Firefox and even in IE8 it degrades acceptably.
- sergiotapia 12y agoFirst thing I noticed is the san fransisco bridge and the gay community rainbow.
- philk10 12y agoBug Go to https://beta.virginamerica.com/cms/fly-with-us https://beta.virginamerica.com/cms/fly-with-us Scroll down, click on the 'learn more' underneath the Internet section - link is 'fpo' Now, how do I report it? :)
- dc_ploy 12y agoIt looks like I can't book a flight. "BUMMER. NO FLIGHTS ARE AVAILABLE FOR THIS DATE. PLEASE TRY ANOTHER DATE." Am I supposed to keep clicking around until I get something? Can I see a listing of "Available flights on the calendar." I tried booking DCA to SAN.
- granttimmerman 12y agoScrolling becomes is really buggy if you Cmd + f to search for something. But overall, nice UI.
- mfkp 12y agoI really don't like this new UI. Instead of having a sorted drop down, now there's a bunch of boxes I have to look through to find the one I'm searching for. Takes a lot longer than it used to. Example: http://cl.ly/image/3D0f2u0Y300Y http://cl.ly/image/3D0f2u0Y300Y
- geuis 12y agoI disagree. I prefer the new bigger box UI. It took a mere moment to understand everything is in alphabetical order, and scanning through them was much quicker than trying to pick from a dropdown list.
- colmvp 12y agoI like how you got downvoted for having a different opinion.
- dingaling 12y agoOne advantage of a drop-down is that you can tab into the control and just start typing the city name. With this mobile-first grid layout, there's no shortcut. You have to read each and every entry and then haul the cursor over to select one.
- lstamour 12y agoThe tough part is that the design doesn't emphasize the alphabetical ordering. If it did, perhaps by making the box outline lighter and placing emphasis on the first letter of each city, that might work better.
- brryant 12y agoThe scrolljacking really makes for a terrible UI/UX. Designers: why is this something we're seeing more often? What is the main benefit?
- ChrisNorstrom 12y agoWell we're seeing it more often in UI/UX because "forced creative vision" aka "design dictatorship" is more popular and acceptable for designers these days. Especially new designers who don't want to stick to the tried and true rules of design (nor learn them), nor base their designs off of some kind of metrics or best practices statistics. Steve Jobs culminated this attitude through his "I'll tell the user what they want" philosophy.
- kyleconrad 12y agoClients drive design 99.9% of the time. Clients like it because they think the cool kids are doing it. Clients also like gimmicky scroll effects and parallax.
- nfoz 12y ago> Clients drive design 99.9% of the time. How does that happen?
- kyleconrad 12y agoBecause they're the ones hiring agencies, deciding mood and content based on presented ideas, and then approving and revising design throughout the process.
- mattm 12y agoWelcome back <blink>
- tericho 12y ago> Steve Jobs culminated this attitude through his "I'll tell the user what they want" philosophy. Apparently users like being told what they want
- 0898 12y ago"Playful avatars", a "cheeky sense of humor". How is that a benefit to us? It's like they left in copy from the agency pitch.
- mrmch 12y agoJust booked a flight I'd been putting off; the new experience is worlds better than other airlines, though it still has its issues. My favorite airline is still United; their website will let you get to the final billing page, and submit your cc, only to find that "that flight isn't available".
- stevenh 12y agoCartoon characters everywhere? "cagillion"? "fun-erer"? I'm not sure if the average customer will enjoy being treated as if they're five years old. I find this unbearably corny and unprofessional.
- madeofpalk 12y agoSeems to fit with their image, just like how they make fun of people who don't know how seatbelts work in their pre-flight safety video. I like it. It's fun and refreshing to see such an output from a 'giant' corporation.
- madebymade 12y agoI think it looks nice, but find certain parts of the UX to be difficult / confusing. I found selecting prices particularly confusing, was not sure where i was supposed to be looking. Sure they will refine and iterate on it tho.
- ansimionescu 12y agoThe boarding pass redesign reminded me of this (and my snarky side is wondering whether they just stole some of the ideas): http://petesmart.co.uk/rethink-the-airline-boarding-pass/ http://petesmart.co.uk/rethink-the-airline-boarding-pass/
- lechevalierd3on 12y agoI really hate scrolling hijacking...
- zaroth 12y agoSomeone else was wondering if this was a parody, I think they might be right. There is so much funky with this, it does feel only half serious. For me it started with 'Book from San Francisco'. I clicked on the 'Boston' button, and it shows this weird top status-bar drop down thing which flashes the message: 'Going to "Hahvahd," perchance?'. What? Then the browser starts, a little bit too slowly, scrolling itself down automatically... Off putting. A moment later, the mocking message slides up and away, and the top nav has been replaced by mostly broken status bar. Try clicking on some of those links in the status bar if you want to get totally lost. Then that calendar view... I mean, if it showed 'From $199...' or whatever under each date, I could understand taking up so much space. I thought it was a lot harder to find the right date this way than with their standard date picker. After picking a date, the flights table is significantly worse than their current design. No way to step forward/backward in dates, no weekly overview, super low contrast, overly spaced out, scroll down forever trying to see all the flights, no sorting,... Even the seat map is weird, I don't know if it's just due to the super-low contrast, or the weird icons they put in place of seat numbers for the seats which are taken, or maybe the weird way they show the pricing for each seating area, but there was a lot of cognitive dissonance trying to understand what I was looking at. What it comes down to is an interface which was trying to make things simpler actually introducing a huge amount of cognitive load where there didn't need to be any. In the end, I zoomed out to 33% to get a birds eye view and while it's interesting to see everything on one page like that, I think they have a LOT of work ahead of them making it actually flow properly, fixing the contrast and layout, removing all the weird and distracting gimmicks, and bring back some of the core functionality that's missing.
- duderific 12y agoI think they took "mobile first" to the extreme, and disregarded desktop. I imagine that giant calendar is pretty cool on an iPad. It's not really responsive design if you optimize only for devices and not for desktop as well.
- gone35 12y agoExcept it is just as awful, if not even worse, on Safari on iPad. At least for me, scrolling is broken and it crashes constantly. I honestly don't understand how website trends can devolve so rapidly and radically. This blunder may well end up costing them millions of dollars in missed sales.
- jds375 12y agoVery well done. Beautiful and simple to use. Most importantly, everything is kept on the same page and it loads quickly. I can't begin tell you how frustrating it can be using something like Expedia or Continental and having to wait so long for the next page to load.... Sometimes it takes too long and I click 'back' and have to start the process all over (resubmit the form). By keeping it on one page that expands downwards, it easy to tell when the next widget is loading and prevents all of this from happening.
- bmetz 12y agoStill can't change my login email ID.
- jonn_g 12y agoTry the keyboard navigation
- stephengoodwin 12y agoEverything looks great, until the "Get Booking" link didn't work on the final slide (in Chrome on iPad)
- ddw 12y agoSame here on a Nexus 5 with Chrome. Oh the irony...
- Dorian-Marie 12y agoIt's pretty but I think they need to do some user testing, booking flight is actually harder: * Choosing departure / arrival is hard * Choosing the date is hard * The "Continue" button is hidden * I see avatars but I don't know what it means, and then I see that I can choose my avatar. * ...
- muxxa 12y agoThis is really nice, but they haven't solved the following problem: sometimes you need more information from further on in the process in order to choose your dates. For some types of trip, the most important thing is a combination of departure time and price; you want the lowest price as long as the departure/arrival is within your acceptable range, and then you want to work 'backwards' to pick dates based on that. I don't know of any airline booking process that accommodates that use-case well.
- kevincrane 12y agoHipmunk lets you search for flights with a certain date range and pick the best flights from that, and there's also a "pricegraph" that sounds like it does exactly what you want by showing you the cheapest prices within the next 90 days.
- jasonwen 12y agoThis is super slick. Design wise it's ahead of its game, instead of another flat design website. I love how they put "life" into their brand with those avatars and make it fun in this all too boring process of buying tickets. To be honest, I would be jealous of how innovative Virgin is lately when I'm another airline. UX wise there are some things I would do differently. There are some rough edges but it's an iterative process and they'll probably track tons of things now. For example, changing prior steps will reset the date selection. Deep respect for their team, I also love their new logo. Awesome!
- User9812 12y agoWell, I give them respect for trying something new. It has some improvements, but the UX falls short in others. 1. Boarding pass is great. 2. Being able to scroll back up to make changes is wonderful. A lot of airline sites are slow, your session breaks when you use the back button, etc. It's nice being able to scroll up, change a date, scroll back down. Well done. As for the downside, it uses way too much space. This might work on a tablet or touch screen, but it's awful for the desktop. For example, your typical airline uses something like this... http://i.imgur.com/bEjWWm0.png http://i.imgur.com/bEjWWm0.png A couple of autocomplete boxes, and a calendar picker that pops up. Works fine, it's all visible in a little box, and easy to use. The virgin site stretches this across a handful of pages, or if you're picking further off dates, it might be 10+ pages. That's just bad design. What they should do is keep a more traditional method of selecting all your airports and dates, then scroll down to the prices when you click continue. I think it would be the best of both worlds. They also need a method of finding the best price over a given time period. Jetstar is one of my favorites when it comes to this... http://booknow.jetstar.com/Search.aspx http://booknow.jetstar.com/Search.aspx Pick a flight, say Brisbane to Sydney for a few weeks in June. Click the box to say you want the lowest price. It gives you a nice little graph with all the cheapest flights highlighted, so you can easily choose your days. Actually, the whole Jetstar booking process is decent, and I used it often in Australia.
- 80 12y ago>Design wise it's ahead of its game, instead of another flat design website. Huh - did we look at the same site? Just the same old minimal bootstrap3core aesthetic that's everywhere nowadays. Found it pleasant to use, though.
- iaskwhy 12y agoText doesn't look right in the latest stable Chrome/Windows 7.
- coin 12y agoSucks on iPad. There's a weird too fast scroll acceleration.
- brianbreslin 12y agoAny idea how they are doing financially lately? I remember reading last fall they were struggling financially.
- mrchess 12y agoLost me at date picking, and then got even more confused when choosing "flights" -- incredibly hard to read the flight table. Not a fan of this refresh.
- highwind 12y agoWhy is the password limited to 16 characters long? I don't understand this limitation on any of the sites.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoThe password length should be limited to something. 16 characters is rather short, though. (Still better than my old webmail, at exactly 6 characters, only uppercase and numbers)
- eevee 12y agoI don't see any reason to ever limit passwords to less than 100 characters.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoAgreed.
- pkamb 12y agoPage Down key doesn't scroll.
- literalusername 12y agoI'm glad it's finally compatible with LastPass! That alone increases usability quite a lot. The cartoon characters strike me as misguided though. Their target demographic is not children.
- 11thEarlOfMar 12y agoConsider the alternative: http://www.united.com/ http://www.united.com/
- mrcwinn 12y agoI think this is imperfect but pretty wonderful. Great job. Feel proud for all the detail work you put into it, designers and engineers!
- the_watcher 12y agoPretty incredible how much better this is than every single competitor.
- joedevon 12y agoThe new site is not accessible unfortunately.
- robertnealan 12y agoFrom a design perspective this is one of the most beautiful airline booking designs I've ever seen, but from a usability perspective it might just be the worst (save for maybe RyanAir). The cities being laid out in a grid looks nice but is ultimately far more difficult to understand then just looking at an alphabetical list in a dropdown. Auto-picking your departure city based on your current location is admittedly a nice detail, but it wasn't immediately obvious how I change where I'm starting as the "link" was different than anything else on the page. The "Who's Flying" section is massive for having so little real information. And why are that the font is 120px (or 12rem) but the "+/-" controls are faded out and tiny by comparison? The calendar is again completely oversized, low contrast, and difficult to understand. My laptop has a 1440x900 resolution screen and I can barely fit a single full month in the window. If I happen to want to buy a ticket more than a month or so in advance, I need to repeatedly click "More Dates" which then appends another two months to the already crazy long page? Also, the low contrast purple highlight for all the dates inbetween departure/return isn't immediately noticeable. When I click on a ticket price another window slides up over it - took a few moments to figure out what actually happened there. Overall the "ticket selection" again looks pretty, but when I can only see a few in the window at any given time it's far less usable than a standard clean list. Also, the "Continue" button looks identical to the other addon options, and it isn't immediately obvious how to progress if you don't want to upgrade your ticket. The seat selection admittedly is admittedly fun looking though why are half the faces looking upset? Also, versions of the seat selection where they actually place the seat INSIDE the plane in it's real physical location are more readable than this abstracted version, though I do like how they clearly broke it up into sections that show the different cabin/seat types. Again though, I can only fit about half the plane on my screen at any given time. Having the form adjacent to the seat selection is a nice touch as you can then easily track who's sitting where as you enter their information (especially if you're a family with kids), but for some reason they neglected to highlight the seat on the visual map. Also, the form is again overly tall and I can only fit about 2/3 of it at any time. Overall I think it's a good start but hardly production ready. My gut instinct is that most people will be impressed by how "pretty" it is, but that the overall conversion rates will decrease significantly. The one really well done idea is the fixed header, though realistically it should progressively fill out with information and not show/hide ticket info at different stages in the process (for instance, it did show my takeoff/landing times and price which was extremely useful, but now hiding that to ask me who's sitting in seat 4B, which is already emphasized at the top of the form).
- Myrmornis 12y agoIn terms of implementation, it's interesting that they chose ugly URLs which encode everything /book/rt/a1c1i1/sfo_bos/20140524_20140528 Note the a1c1i1: that's "1 Adult 1 Child 1 Infant" and it changes as you adjust the widgets (without a page refresh). Also, minor detail, but I'm interested to see that they use PUT as well as POST to update the server with the selections. So that's following modern "REST" guidelines (use verbs properly) but the URLs are anything but! EDIT: I put "REST" in quotes to refer vaguely to modern API practices. I know REST is strictly something else, please let's not talk about that it's really boring.
- andrewfong 12y agoMaybe they encode everything in the URL to allow the back button to effectively function as an undo button. EDIT: I take that back. Apparently, the back button does not undo something like adding a child to your booking.
- alister 12y agoIt's gotten to the point that whenever I want to post a URL in an article or email a URL to someone, I need to sanitize it. I don't know what information I might be leaking. If the URL looks like it might have some hidden information, what I usually do nowadays is to navigate to that location from a separate browser (in which I have no passwords, logins, cookies, history), and cut and paste the URL from there.
- Myrmornis 12y ago> what I usually do nowadays is to navigate to that location from a separate browser (in which I have no passwords, logins, cookies, history) incognito/porn mode should work for that too
- state 12y agoSomewhat unrelated: I spent the majority of the day on a VA flight and I feel like I'm still recovering from sitting under those colored lights. Really, seriously, what is the benefit? At first I just felt nauseous, and after a while it just turned in to a dull headache. Usually air travel is great and productive, but that "club" lighting has got to go.
- rmason 12y agoI may be just an old curmudgeon but I will choose functional over pretty every single time. By trying too hard to look hip it becomes a caricature of itself.
- icpmacdo 12y agoWhat is the name of this new website design that is just one page that you scroll through.
- gone35 12y ago"Multi-page slideshow with vertical transitions", apparently[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7792585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7792585
- h1karu 12y agoWhen I clicked that I wanted to go from Austin TX to Portland, OR it said "pack your plaid". This is just a poorly done rip-off of hipmonk's messaging. It's just going to confuse people who aren't familiar with silly internet-meme based stereotypes about whatever city it is they're choosing. It's just a bad idea. Portland's message should have said something about roses, or Mount hood, or even make reference to the fact that it rains a lot there, but not some fuzzy stereotype about how a certain age group tend to dress.
- tericho 12y agoLate to the party but this is stunning. If any of the devs are reading this I'd love to chat about your Angular implementation.
- shalmanese 12y agoIt's pretty but it's missing the one feature I love from the old site which is to quickly scrub through dates to figure out if there's a cheaper flight earlier or later than my planned date. My travel plans are usually somewhat flexible so I'm often willing to shift by a day or two to save $100.
- eevee 12y agoFantastic. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoYFJleIMAAmgMH.png:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoYFJleIMAAmgMH.png:large beta.virginamerica.com is, of course, a blank white void. Filling out a form and clicking some buttons is such futuristic technology that we can no longer figure out how to make it work without JavaScript.
- spez 12y agoI don't know... maybe because it's 2014?
- eevee 12y agoOh, you're right. It should definitely be built in Shockwave Flash instead, which is even newer and shinier than JavaScript.
- nobotty 12y agoFlash as a technology is a caveman compared to modern Javascript-based technologies. There is no audience that does not have JS enabled -- other than the fringe who would probably be better off using wget to browse the internet.
- eevee 12y agoWe said exactly the same things about Flash not so many years ago, including the pretentious dismissal of anyone who would dare not support the technology we wanted to use. Before that (and to some extent even now) it was operating systems: what kind of hippie doesn't run Windows, after all? It's pretty easy to justify technical decisions by pigeonholing anyone not using our same platform as The Kind Of People who we don't want giving us money anyway. There are quite a few comments here complaining about the gaudy unusable interface produced by "modern JavaScript-based techniques", which in this case appear to provide virtually nothing that static HTML and CSS can't do. The dev team was lazy and wanted to show off, and screw anyone who doesn't think running gobs of arbitrary code should be a necessity for buying a ticket. And for what it's worth my non-developer artist girlfriend has been using noscript for longer than I have. I'll let her know what modern devs think of her, though I don't think she's heard of wget.
- Sami_Lehtinen 12y agoLol. On my mobile out flashes between showing that yellow face an that laptop. Absolutely zero usability. They could show fail or 404 as well. Customer leaves the site in three seconds not even knowing or caring about what this s@@t is.
- lilpirate 12y agoWell, on stock Android browser, there's just a redirect loop.
- qmr 12y agoThis is horrible and broken. Real information replaced with "flat" design and stupid hip made up words like "fun-erer". No javascript: http://i.imgur.com/8HkKyZx.png There is a delay of at least 100ms scrolling up and down between pages. I would guess 150ms. I do not see any obvious way of changing this, and the scroll bars are hidden. What if I need to change something at the top of the page? I also managed to break scrolling ending up halfway between pages somehow. The only way to fix this was to painfully scroll all the way to one end to reset things. No CSS: http://i.imgur.com/u5g0eaS.png The site appears to scale horribly, and it looks like they are using javascript to generate styles. IANA web developer and have not studied modern web stuff in a long time, but this seems like A Bad Idea. No CSS or javascript: http://i.imgur.com/Kb2JZAH.png I do not even want to think about the accessibility issues. All in all it seems like they are just following the flat design trend, for the sake of following it. I am sure they have good intentions, but just from analyzing this page I am underwhelmed.
- nailer 12y agoAccessible browsers run Javascript, and have for some time. You may have a point about CSS though.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoI'd argue the other way. Accessible websites are usable without JS. Maybe not pretty, but at least usable.
- nailer 12y agoI don't think you understood my comment.
- benaston 12y agoCan anyone tell me the company(ies) that designed and implemented this website? They seem to have negotiated a much freer hand with the client wrt design than is typical.
- nailer 12y agoTried to scroll down, nothing happened, then it scrolled way too far, then my browser was unresponsive and I had to kill it. iPad, iOS 7. Edit: tried a second time and slowed down my scrolling to get the site to work. 'get Booking' doesn't work. Like the folding boarding pass though.
- orbitingpluto 12y agoI thought the option to select an avatar in the seating layout was an interesting feature: so the gregarious can sit with the gregarious, the droolers with the droolers, and the taciturn with the taciturn. Selecting a female gender would probably guarantee you don't get an empty seat next to you however... But of course most of these booking sites actually hide pricing information until you tell them exactly when and where you want to fly. You won't find out that you can save some money by taking a two leg obscure routing or flying the day before.
- archagon 12y agoOn a meta note: it seems that design-related posts on HN tend to be pretty controversial. Has there ever been a redesign posted here that garnered universal praise?
- doctorfoo 12y agoYet another "made for mobile" site. I hate these. Huge font sizes, massive images, wide margins surrounding all elements, wasted space everywhere, floating header obscuring the content. Ugh.
- verdi327 12y agothis site is beautiful. UX could be better but I don't understand why the comments are so woefully negative. It's still very easy to book a flight
- astletron 12y agoWorked terribly in Safari on iPhone 4s. No excuse for that at this late day.
- omilu 12y agoI appreciated the humor, and the cool colors helped.
- DigitalSea 12y agoAs a developer myself, I've seen first hand this new trend of scroll-jacking, parallax, animated, full-screen sections come in quicker than a rain storm. I am just glad the whole horizontal layout thing isn't a thing any more, horizontal sites were way worse in my opinion than this new trend of turning websites into Powerpoint presentations. I do like the aesthetic this new trend has, but accessibility wise, it's a no-go. I feel bad for anyone with eyesight problems in particular who comes across this site and has to read text on rainbow coloured backgrounds. These kinds of sites are not very well accommodating to colour blind visitors and that's no way to run a business. Then there are screen height issues with the design. People on net-books and iPad's in landscape orientation are probably not going to enjoy this site very much as nothing really fits on the screen properly. The result is undeniably beautiful though, and from an investor/board member perspective, I can definitely feel the enthusiasm from here. This is the kind of site that gets everyone on board, except the developers who have to build it (in most cases).