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.

How often have you battled to get an appointment with the doctor, taken time out of work, only to arrive and then sit in the doctors surgery for 45 minutes because they are running late (which they always are).

A simple text message sent to every patient booked in – say – 1 hour before their appointment – indicating ‘how’ late the surgery is running could not only mean much quieter waiting rooms, but also a much more positive (and less frustrating) experience for the individual, not to mention the millions of pounds which the economy would gain in productivity.

A clear example of where a little experience design could not only benefit the user, but also other users, the service operator and the country as a whole.

Before you watch these videos its probably worth spelling out exactly what they are, and what they are trying to do. Aurora has been produced for the Mozilla Labs Concept series. The Concept Series aims to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

Aurora (Part 4) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo. (Oh, and if you haven’t pressed play already, your internet connection isn’t going down. It was produced that way!)

I have to say when I first saw it I thought it seemed incredibly complex, and seemed to be trying introduce too many concepts to comprehend in just a few minutes. Particularly the first scenario seemed a little odd – it didn’t seem like a task that needed to be solved. It also left me a little bewildered and confused. There is just sooo much “technology” to take in.  And it seemed so complex. So many icons, options, and ways of using them.

Many of the comments on the Vimeo website reflect this with comments such as “most people want usability rather than bling.” But as I watched the third and fourth video I could start to envisage where I see this type of concept working really well. I suppose the question a lot of people would have is whether a browser could truly do all of this, or whether it is really a new operating system.

Either way I find it fascinating, and will keep an eye on the Labs concept series with great interest. I’m sure that a lot of the concepts are so new, we will all need to be introduced to them very slowly.