5 ms·
From 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
by robertnealan 12y ago
From 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).
- alister 12y agoHaving tried the new virginamerica.com site just now, I don't really see a big difference between their site and anyone else's. Having booked through a lot of different airline sites over the last 15 years, I want to say that the differences between airline sites were much greater in the early web years. All the airline sites seemed to have converged to a common model. They all follow exactly the same flow: pick cities and dates, then pricing, then sign in, etc. There was far greater variation in the flow in the early years. > but from a usability perspective it might just be the worst Oh, I can cite major airline websites that are much worse from a usability perspective. Trying to book a flight on any Brazilian airline is impossible unless you're Brazilian. That's because every airline in Brazil has inexplicably decided that they want you to enter your Brazilian identity number -- explained in more detail here: http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Booking_a_domestic_flight_within_Brazil#Difficulties_of_airline_booking_for_visitors_to_Brazil http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Booking_a_domestic_fl... If you're not Brazilian, you don't have such a number of course. Note that this is not any sort of legal requirement; it's just thoughtlessness about usability by the airlines. I expect a lot of indignation this summer when visitors try to arrange flights inside of Brazil during the World Cup.
- robertnealan 12y agoIt has the same functionality as any other site, but many of the ways in which it's presented is far less easy to use (for instance, the calendar select is pretty looking but not nearly as obvious to use as even the standard ugly jQueryUI calendar widget). The Brazilian airline policy of requiring an identity number is definitely a terrible decision on their part, but that doesn't excuse other airlines from making needlessly flashy and overcomplicated complicated UI's.
- personlurking 12y agoEven with a CPF, the document needed (which isn't excessively hard to get if you're a foreigner in Brazil), there's another problem...using a US card to pay. Unless they've changed their ways in the last few years it's still near impossible to pay on any Brazilian airline site or any Kayak-like site in Brazil with an American debit card with Visa or Mastercard symbol. Last time I had to book at SDU (Rio airport), I needed to take most of my day to go to the airport, wait in long lines and buy the ticket physically, with cash or (get this) by card! This was a 5-6h process including public transport (and I actually lived 10m away by car at the time). ___ At the risk of getting too off-topic (which I may have already done above), here's another recent public transport problem, when bus drivers went on strike in Sao Paulo, this is what happened on the metro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXycKeyDKXk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXycKeyDKXk