First impressions, clean, simple and smart. Young and fairly unemotional.

I just booked a flight on JetBlue’s new website. It was the most awesome experience I’ve had in a long time. “Tada!” http://bit.ly/cf0xm7

• The primary ’search’ function really stands out of the page giving users a clear indication of where they should start.
• The main real estate to the right of the search contains a number of promotions BUT they all take a visual step back from the search panel in terms of design and visual weight.
• Easy going tone of voice immediately makes me feel relaxed.
• I wonder how many people realise there is more than one promotion, and is that a problem?
• The palette feels a little bare on repeat visits

Destination overlay

I found the airport ajax overlay easy to use and liked the way I’m able to see all the vast array of options before having to select anything.

Interstitial

I thought this was worth including as it’s so often overlooked. If you’ve got some USP’s that you need to communicate to your customers, use this vital few seconds whilst you’ve got their full attention. Good copywriting here.

Search results

• Visually good heirachy makes this complex page easy to understand
• I like the use of the very polished tabs showing differing date options. I know from experience that this is particularly difficult to achieve and its lovely to see it done with such a level of polish. I think part of what makes it work well is the fact that the ’selected’ options has been made larger both in terms of font size and the removal of the abbreviation for the week day.
• Scarcity – I like the info showing how many seats are left at that price, although couldn’t understand why it didn’t show for all prices.
• Your itinerary shows the connecting flights in a format that is incredibly space efficient and reasonably easy to comprehend.
• Call to actions are clear and well differentiated.

Choose a seat

• Apart from being ‘very clever’ it’s clear and easy understand.
• I did get stuck when I escaped out of one of the overlay/pop-ups.
• Nice tone of voice upselling ‘wiggle room’ will add to the feel good factor of purchasing.

Overall it’s a very good example of where travel sites should be heading to, and although it’s not as complicated as a full ‘holidays’ purchase I think there are still learnings to be had. Unfortunately once you venture into the full holiday’s section the design falls back to what I am presuming is an earlier iteration of the current website.

Background

As a designer for a large travel outfit I have now spent quite a few years working on the intricacies of online travel and know first hand how difficult it is to get right. In fact I think most people who are expert in this field would agree, nobody has really got the user experience for booking holidays online completely right yet. For that reasons I’m always on the lookout for good examples of user experience in travel.

All good stuff, particularly the carnival, although it works wonderfully in ‘The Bathtub’

Bathtub V from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

It kind of made me want to go and shoot the Notting Hill Carnival this year.

I had set up a couple of jCarousel arrays and found that one one page (which had it’s won unique styling) the carousel animation seemed to glitch, dragging the background with it in a jumpy, jaggedy manner.

The solution

Having searched online I couldn’t find any other instances of this. After half a day of de-constructing the page I finally found that the css file was to blame. It wasn’t the contents, but the file itself, which must have somehow become slightly corrupt or contained some hidden characters.

Either way I managed to find an earlier source file, save a new version and copy all the styles over.

Strange, but true and hopefully this post might save someone out there a great deal of time.

User Centred Design and Experience Design are both schools of thought with one clear goal – to make users lives better. People who know me will testify that trying to make users lives better is one of my primary motivations when it comes to approaching web design.

Some usability reasearch appears to ignore the emotional, which I believe is a key part of the overall experience. I think advertisers know this, which is probably why we have so much advertising based on humour. Creating a positive emotional response from somebody is pretty much akin to making a friend. Except its not you making a friend, its your brand. And thats going to be far more long lasting than any tactical great deal or offer (although friends do like favours!)

As such I was thrilled to read the “Experience Design Manifesto” – written by Andrë Braz.

In the manifesto Andre outlines his ideas for what Experience Design should do which includes the following points.

Experiences that foster happiness should have the following qualities:

• Make people feel confident of themselves.
• Make people feel they can do something better. Empowers people to do something in a better way.
• Improve people’s lives helping to solve existing pragmatic problems
• Make people have an enjoyable and fun time during the experience, thus making life worth to be lived.
• Surprises people in a magic way, bringing delight to the eyes and making the mind wonder.
• Create an emotional connection between everyone involved, the experience itself and the one supporting the experience (a brand or a person)
• Make the world a better place to live
• Strenghten relationships between people that live the same experience

Read the “Experience Design Manifesto” – written by Andrë Braz.

         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Experience Design Manifesto

It’s not only a trip down memory lane but also quite an ingenious little plinky plonk remix of Radiohead’s Nude, and if it’s for real, which it claims to be, it is quite literally – genius!

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

So why use Starkers? The Starkers theme is a brillant starting point from any Web Designer/Developer point of view since it gives us the clean starting point from which to style up the website. It starts by stripping out all css, and implements a universal reset like this one.This is fabulous since it never is easy modifying other peoples css. More importantly it cleans up the code generated with the result being clean, semantic markup which in theory makes the website more accessible, googleable, maintainable, and more visible by multiple devices. SO in theory, all the building blocks are in place for a highly accessible website.

Yesterday we went to the Shaw Trust in Wales to get our company website audited from an accessibility point of view. The Shaw Trust is a national charity that provides training and work opportunities for people who are disadvantaged in the labour market due to disability, ill health or other social circumstances. They offer a Web Accessibility Accreditation service to businesses which is designed to be the most comprehensive service available and endorsed by GAWDS (The Guild of Accessible Web Designers), it combines a full technical audit with rigorous disability user testing. Every member of the testing team is an experienced assistive technology user and understands the frustrations of not being able to access websites that don’t consider the needs of disabled users.

It was a really interesting day spending time with real people with differing needs, using the website on an array of different devices, from switches to screen readers. I have been involved with much discussion about accessibility – normally amongst colleagues and the wider online community, but had never spent time with real people accessing websites on all of these devices. Seeing all the little improvements we could make to our website – which would make a big difference for people of differing needs made me realise that I have kind of put accessibility no the back seat for a while. Resting happy that my semantic markup would be easily accessible to a screen reader – I had forgotten about the useful devices which can easily be implemented, from high contrast layouts and access keys to skip menus – which make a massive difference to all sorts of users.

Suffice to say it will be a while until we can implement these changes to our website but that got me thinking that it might be nice to include some of those accessibility features – as standard – in a Wordpress theme.

The Starkers Accessibility Theme

So I got to thinking that maybe I could build no the great work done by Elliot Jay Stocks by adding in some standard accessibility components into the Starkers theme. That’s where I am at the moment and I am wondering what features I would like to include. Off the top of my head I might add in:

1. Skip menu and access keys – hidden by css but accessible to keyboard and screen reader users
2. Style sheet switcher – to enable a high contrast layout
3. An accessibility guide for the website

Your feedback

Is there anything you think should be included, or not included in such a  theme. I’d love to hear your feedback

Silverback will give even the smallest studio an informed understanding of user experience – .NET magazine

Your camera records the user while their desktop experience is simultaneously captured, along with a visual feedback system which highlights where clicks occur. The two videos are then outputted, picture to picture in quicktime.

At just $49 this will allow even the smallest of studios to gain valuable insight into people’s behaviour whilst using their websites.

.Net magazine scored the beta version at 4/5 which is pretty good for a product which costs all of £25.

For me the only drawback is that you I just have to shell out £699 to buy myself a mac to get it working on. Maybe they will create a Windows version too at some point.

So what are you waiting for?

Grab some people of the street, give it to your mum or dad, or maybe actually pay the right demographic of people to participate in a common transaction and you could have some invaluable insights into how they interact with your website, and where their difficulties lie in achieving their goals.

Speculation on the future

I was thinking how great it would be to have an app like this online, so that you could get users the world over to do your testing for you. I know Flash can (with permission) take images from a persons webcam and microphone – I wonder how far away we are from a solution like that

Silverback is available from tomorrow and was developed by the lovely people at ClearLeft and I would liem to personally thank them for making it so affordable and therefore accessible.

Power to the people!

http://www.silverbackapp.com/

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

From Fubiz

Wales in Style provides the discerning visitor with the very best of Welsh tourism. It’s a by-invitation-only online community centred on a Website seed-funded originally by the Welsh Assembly, now run as partnership subscription model operated by Designate on behalf of the Welsh Assembly Government.

The award recognises creativity, user-friendliness, conversion levels, and effectiveness to increase traffic and boost sales.

I was involved heavily with the project, converting initial concept work into final designs, working on the IA closely with one of our producers, performing some ad-hoc user testing, and finally building the detailed html templates.

We endeavoured to make the website fully accessible and we’re delighted with the outcome of both a great looking website based on well formed and semantic html.

Designate won the award Best Agency for Website Design in the category Marketing and Innovation awards.

http://www.walesinstyle.com