United Airlines Redesign Gets Halfway There
I'm planning a couple of trips for the coming months and, as has been my habit for over a year now, I started with Kayak. The best fare available was on United so Kayak handed me off to United.com to make the purchase. Two screens into my experience, I realized that I was looking at a completely new version of United.com.
Overall, the site redesign is an improvement. Many of the reservation screens are streamlined to make it easier to use United.com to find the flight you want to buy. The visual design has been modernized and a few helpful widgets have been added. The best one I found shows how often the flight you are looking at is on-time. This kind of data is handy when deciding how close you want to cut the timing of your layover.
Where the design falls flat is the seamlessness of the experience. The lack of Ajax for basic behaviors like tab-switching or list sorting leaves travelers waiting for the page to reload only to show a simple comparison. Sites like Kayak and Farecast differentiate themselves from their competition by offering a seamless experience. Kayak wowed me early on with their simple price sliders that instantly update the flights displayed on the screen. This model has existed for over a year now. United should take this experience as a baseline and come up with ways to add unique value.
Moreover, many users only get to United.com by being handed off from Yahoo! Travel, Kayak, or another travel site. This is an opportunity to create a seamless experience. On United, the flight I chose at Kayak is the first presented in the list, but it is displayed below a price grid offering more expensive flights in Business or First class. They know that I am being referred from Kayak. Unless they have data to show that this kind of aggressive up-selling works, it interrupts the experience.
Instead, United could present the chosen flight clearly. They know from the referrer and the link that the user has clicked directly to a specific query from an outside location. The design should be smart enough to accomodate this. The first box should look different and clearly state that it is the chosen flight. They could then present a few alternatives based on price or schedule to reinforce the feeling in the shopper that they are sure of their choice.
If United can show me a better option than I could find on Kayak, the chance that I will go directly to United.com the next time I need fly will improve. By showing a screen with options I would never take (the $1000 first class alternative to my $230 flight) they are making me feel like I don't matter to them as much as a business customer. How they make me feel matters and is something that their design process should take into account. Like Lou Carbone articulated at the recent Adaptive Path Managing Experience Conference, your customers cannot not have an experience. By not taking the initiative to make sure that I, as a referred shopper from a travel planning site, have a good experience, United is taking the risk that I will have a bad or, at best, a mixed experience. This will impact my future travel planning decisions and may color my entire experience using their service.
United's new design gets them halfway to a great experience. The visual design is clean and the reservation steps have been simplified. Adding bits of data, like how often their flights arrive on time, conveys an important feeling of transparency. What United needs to do next is step back and do some serious competitive analysis. They should consciously position their site in the travel-planning workflow of the Web 2.0 world. Also, investing in bringing their interactions up to the contemporary baseline would help position their site as a first stop when planning travel, particularly for those customers who regularly choose United.
My prescription for United.com is a healthy dose of user research and a dash of Ajax.
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Who is this guy?
I think the main reason that a lot of large commodity websites are still resistant to the Web 2.0 trappings (e.g. Ajax, CSS, etc.) is that they aim for the LCD (lowest common denominator) setup. They assume that there might be some high-roller sale that's still using IE 5.5, or Netscape 4.7, or something similar, and that throwing the entire system into new tech will prevent a sale.
You and I use Kayak because we're sold on its convenience and clean interface that simply works: it's all Ajaxy, so there's a lot of intuitive, interactive content that's easy to manipulate. But to the web Luddites, they only expect something static (save for Flash content).
Do I agree with this? No, if only because any look at the stats of big sites (e.g. college home pages) shows that the big player browser is IE 6.0. And while IE 6.0 isn't the best ticket to ride, it will at least play sorta-nice with an Ajax-laden site.
Perhaps United has a few too many paranoid cooks stirring the broth....
Rudi: Your point about browser support is very well taken. Many organizations take lowest common denominator approach thinking that this is the only way to control the experience of users with old browsers.
This approach is a ham-fisted solution to a delicate problem. As you point out, a cursory look at usage statistics for a major site shows that the vast majority of site visitors are viewing your site through a modern browser.
But this is not to say that an organization should disregard users with old browsers or who are using assistive technologies. Simply ruling out technologies that will improve the experience for the majority of visitors is not required.
Yahoo! offers a ready-made strategy for handling browser support. Their graded browser support approach abandons the idea of "supporting" a particular browser and instead embraces the idea of progressive enhancement.
In this model, all visitors to the site will get a working, usable experience. However, a visitor who arrives via Netscape 4 or IE 5.5 will not see exactly the same thing or have exactly the same experience as someone using IE 7 or Firefox 2.
This is important to take seriously because the cost of continuing to "support" these old browsers with every pixel and each interaction solution is becoming increasingly costly as the install base of modern browsers continues to expand.
Gah! You're coming to Chicago and didn't tell me?!
Free yourselves up on Sunday the 24th. Cubs/Cards in the bleachers.
And they had the on-time percentages before, they just weren't quite as obvious.