American Airlines Spanked

Dustin Curtus, a UI designer, took constructive criticism to the next level by not only taking American Airlines to task for having a website with a horrible user experience but by designing a great alternative and releasing it into the public. 

I'm a huge fan of what he's done with his redesign mockup.   Almost any travel website is just this huge clusterfuck of menu options and clutter that don't really help you figure out how to buy the tickets you want.  I can't speak for everybody but when I go to a travel oriented website I'm usually just looking for a baseline price to decide how feasible it is for me to travel.

For example I've been searching for plane/train tickets to Washington, CT to attend the Stackoverflow conference in October.  On almost every site I've gone to to buy tickets I couldn't just type in Hartford, CT to Washington DC and get a list of ticket options for travel.  I always had to learn some airport code or train station name to get a price quote. 

One day website / user experience designers will get over their 2003 "show all the options on the page" type of design and start guiding their users through their complex.  The first travel site that lets me type in really simple information to get a list of stations/airports/prices is going to start getting my business.  KISS/Affordance is in and I'm sure the customers will travel with whoever gets the formula right first.

Posted via email from John’s posterous

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.