Displaying price trends on travel sites
October 24, 2007
Everyones seen the price graphs generated by the likes of Farecast which predict airfares over a period of time, and we’ve all seen the calendar based booking flows from BA and Virgin Atlantic.
They’re all great (Farecast especially) but they aren’t the most user friendly designs going.
What I’ve always looked for in a good online travel experience (as well as a usable, intuitive booking flow, inspiring content etc) is user friendly ways to display price trends integrated into product content as well as after entering specific dates etc.
Now Hotels.com have released a new piece of functionality on their U.S. website which shows price trends in a really easy to interpret manner. They’ve implemented interactive hotel rate calendars which show prices by day in a calendar format and colour coded so users can easily spot the best times to book.
The image above shows an open rate calendar for a specific hotel.
It’s a really nicely implemented piece of functionality but the one thing that’s wrong is that I have to specify the date and party size before I can view it. I’d like to see this being available without entering the dates so I can browse the hotels and see a rough guide price (maybe for a standard room with 2 adults) displayed over a year. That would really be useful!
It strikes me that tour operators could use this to help their price sensitive customers find their best deals too. Package (dirty word) holidays are often priced the same over long periods so being able to see colour coded heat maps of the year showing price fluctuation would be a great value add to any tour operators website. Wonder who’ll be first to do it?
Jakob Nielsen on banner blindness
August 20, 2007
Really good insight as ever from usability expert Jakob Nielsen here. In this article he discusses whats known as banner blindness, the fact that users are often oblivious to the presence of banner adverts on the web. The study he’s undertaken involved eyetracking and the results are pretty conclusive.
The findings show that designing banner ads which supposedly stand out as they are different colours and using borders is actually a false economy and you are better off integrating your advertising into a websites content. Users tend to avoid focusing on objects that look very different from the site design, often hardly glancing at them and rarely clicking. Google are an example of someone who’s got this just right in their implementation of Adwords. As everyone knows, one of the main reasons Adwords works so well is that users rarely identify them as any different to a natural search result.
It’s something I’ve always suspected as users always respond better to cohesive designs where all the elements of a website hang together and complement each other. We recently redesigned our homepage and one of the elements was a promo banner displaying a ‘book online and save’ message. In the new design this is just a textual message on the screen as opposed to a bordered banner, and traffic to that page has doubled since the design changed!
Top ten shopping cart mistakes
August 16, 2007
Here’s a really interesting paper from Usability News detailing the top ten mistakes websites make with e-commerce shopping cart design and implementation.
If usability and user centered design are your thing then you should read this. The top ten items are taken from an article resulting from a survey in 2002 and have been updated to take into account how online retailers have responded to usability issues in the shopping and check out process.
There’s some lessons to be learned for even the most experienced interface designer here!
Web 2.0 breaking the rules of good, usable design
May 14, 2007
Good article on the BBC website citing Jakob Nielsens comments regarding the state of web design today and it’s impact on users. Jakob says that the hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design and said that the rush to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served. He said sites peppered with personalisation tools were in danger of resembling the “glossy but useless” sites at the height of the dotcom boom.
Valid points by Mr Nielsen, but I believe this is just indicative of a boom (yes the web is booming). There are so many people trying to jump into the online arena that many are bound to overlook the basics, also with so many design firms out there more of them are going to be of a lower quality (same as happened in the dotcom boom). There will always be badly designed sites, and with the temptation to add endless filters, widgets and features there will be many mistakes made along the way.
Don’t fall into the trap of adding features for features sake, make them useful and usable if you want customers to keep coming back!
ZenZui, a usable mobile interface?
March 27, 2007
ZenZui is a new mobile phone interface being developed by a company which came out of Microsoft Research and now runs independently although funded by Microsoft’s IP Ventures.
They’ve created a zoomable interface for mbile phones which is looking pretty good from the demo video they’ve created.
Designed by experts in human computer interaction it really does look like a step forwards in how we can access information on the small screen. Just looking at the demo video shows me that the interface has the potential to remove a lot of the frustrations that I come across while browsing the web on my N73.
Check out the demo below:
10 ways to get more money out of your e-commerce site!
March 16, 2007
When it’s time to redesign or tweak your e-commerce website what areas should you focus on? Is it just a matter of rebuilding from scratch or applying a new coat of paint? Or are there key areas you should be focusing on?
Help is at hand… Jakob Nielsen, that bastion of usability and helpful tips (although I know some people don’t agree with everything he says and I’m one of them) has published a new article titled 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities.
There’s some really good points on where you should focus your efforts so this is well worth a read for anyone who wants to increase their conversion rate and get more revenue.
New online travel design book
January 25, 2007
It’s not very often I find a book that while being of interest from a web point of view also refers directly to the industry I am a part of. ‘Designing Emotions in Online Travel‘, published by Sotopia, seems from the extract to be a really relevant read for anyone from designers to strategists in the online travel world.
It’s been written by some usability experts (which always bodes well for me) and touches on the methods by which we can convey the emotion involved in a travel research/booking process to the user through a web experience. It’s highly pertinent to me at this time when I am assessing the potential for a redesign of our front end. Being able to give the user the same emotional experience they get by flicking through the pages of a brochure or stepping into a travel agent is vitally important (and something many of the online travel agents neglect completely).
Needless to say I’ve ordered my copy.
New Kuoni website
January 24, 2007
Kuoni has launched it’s new website in the last few days. The rumours were that it was supposed to go live before Xmas but got delayed due to how busy the first few weeks of January are. Although I do work for a competitor (of sorts) I thought I’d give it a brief review…
My first impressions were how much more usable it is than their old site, it’s a vast improvement and should really impact their numbers booked online. The new homepage is clean and uncluttered, contains easy to understand navigation and a booking form (the first time they’ve had a booking form on the homepage!) I really like what they’ve done with this page. They have easy ways to navigate through their products; by type of holiday, by destination and (for the traditionalists) by brochure making it really easy to find what you are looking for. A new special offers section is clearly marked and easy to find although the way the offers are listed isn’t particularly easy to scan. Promotional area on the homepage is minimal at the moment however it’s obvious that they could expand downwards as the page is not very long at the moment and as we all know the old ‘below the fold’ argument doesn’t hold as much weight as it used to (with screen sizes growing by the day). The markup is looking good and I really like the fact they’ve used more space and allowed the width of the site to be fluid according to browser width.
Usability is much improved and from a quick glance at the code accessibility looks much better than the old site too!
All in all it’s a massive improvement! Top marks to the Kuoni web team, I’d expect the 15% booked online that they currently quote will jump quite quickly.
Microsofts new homepage
December 15, 2006
Microsoft have released a redesigned homepage on their main corporate website. It is literally just their homepage that’s changed, the rest of the site is as it has ever been.
The redesigned homepage looks much better, the layout is much more up to date and they’ve obviously taken notice of current design, colour and layout trends.
However, this keeping up with the latest trends looks to have been taken a little too far! They’ve really tried to emulate the Web2.0 crew by stuffing a clunky AJAX navigation module into the page. It’s a nice bit of navigation but is incredibly slow to load, in Firefox 2.0 it is so slow and caused the browser to hang while loading meaning you couldn’t switch to another tab or use any other browser features. It’s slightly better in IE7 but only marginally, the speed is still slower than I’d expect for any piece of website navigation.
The speed of the nav is verging on being so slow it’s unusable, it made me want to find another site to find the info I was looking for straight away. Of course, being Microsoft, chances are the info you want may only be on their website so you may have no choice but to persevere…
My opinion? Top marks for trying to bring their homepage up to date, zero for execution.
Too many web 2.0 companies emerging…
December 11, 2006
E-Consultancy reports from Le Web 3 with comments from Danny Rimmer of Index Ventures (a venture funding firm who backed the likes of Last.fm and Spotrunner). Danny said: “What I am concerned about is that it seems everyone wants to start a company instead of just surrounding an idea and going after it. When you have mutiple companies going after the same opportunity, things are not going to work out for everyone.”
Not exactly insight of the year, but a valid point and one that all the web 2.0 bandwagon jumpers should heed before they churn out another social news, video sharing or niche community site. Follow some basic rules to make sure your web 2.0 site/service gets the attention it deserves:
- Try and come up with something different.
- Make sure it really is useful (a lot of web 2.0 sites really don’t have all that much value for the end users).
- Don’t enter a market that is saturated with well funded opposition unless you really have found something totally unique (and hopefully in demand) to offer.
- Do your research; find out who else is doing something similar, find out how much traffic may be available to you, get good estimates for market size etc (helps for approaching VC’s too).
- Do some usability testing; even if it’s just your mates/Dad/grandparents. Too many services are being launched which don’t seem to have taken into account the fact that real people, some of whom won’t be web savvy will be the target audience.
