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.

And it’s not the first. I’m thinking Cut Copy, James Yuill and others. The simplicity of the sound, the clear synthesis, the games console sounds – all harks back to early experimental dance music. And I love it. I can’t for the life of me recall the particular track ‘When I grow up’ reminds me of but for some reason I can’t help about thinking about a time in the early nineties and lots of time spent at outdoor all-night parties mostly around the woodlands and downs where I lived.

Anyhow, check out the track and if it rings a bell with you let me know. Oh, and did I even mention the video – ok it might be just a tad disturbing at first but really…on reflection, it is pretty special, I hope you’ll agree.

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.

Background: Since I can neither afford the luxury of an Apple OS or stand any longer the bloated and slow Windows I thought it was about time to try out Linux on a computer at home. Since the majority of use of this home computer will be browser based (and since soon I believe a great deal of applications will be browser based) I figured that there was nothing to stop me giving it a go.

Well I have to say that once I got the installation complete I was most pleased with myself, and very happy with my zippy new computer.

What you will need
- Your Ubuntu installation CD
- Your windows drivers/hardware drivers cd

It is just fabulous the way that Ubuntu automatically detects all hardware and everything just works automatically – that is – everything except my wireless USB and thus my connection to the internet.

My wife and I both have a deep seated hate of wires and that combined with a quirky house means that wireless is the only way to go for us.

Unfortunately Ubuntu simply did not see my wireless adapter, and there appeared to be no way of actually installing it.

In a flustered state I managed to get our other computer online and tried to look up how to get ubuntu to work with a wireless usb and found a wealth of articles, and forum posts, most of which seemed to involve going to the command line and writing an essay in code.

Of course everything I tried threw errors and exceptions and to this day I have no idea of how to login as ‘root’.

But having looked a little further I found out the solution was fairly simple, so I thought I would write a post on it in the hope it will save somebody a lot of time.

It might not work for everybody but could be a good place to start before you get your handy dirty in the Terminal window.

The solution

You will need to get a few programs running to get your adater working. One is a program which I think controls and ‘helps’ wireless networking run and the second is a graphical user interface which converses with the first program without the user having to use the command line. Follow these steps

1. Go to: System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager
2. Search there for: ndiswrapper-utils, ndiswrapper-common and ndisgtk
3. If nothing is found then Insert your Ubuntu CD
4. You will now need to add the CD to your ‘Souces’. In administration ‘Manage Sources’ and add your cd/dvd
5. Now in Synaptic Package Manager click on “Source” (This means the Ubuntu Source CD I think!?)
6. Again search for ndiswrapper-utils, ndiswrapper-common and ndisgtk
7. You should now be able to tick these items and save the Package Manager, which will then install the three programs
8. Go to System > Administration > Windows Wireless devices (This is the new program you’ve just installed ndiskgt thanks to Sam Pohlenz)
9. Now Click on Insert New Driver
10. Insert your cd which came with your wireless device
11. Browse to the cd and look for the .inf files.
12. Select the .inf file
    Note: Normally these will be in a config forlder or an inf folder and will probably be oranised by Windows Operating System. I chose Vista driver as this was most recent but with one adapter this didn’t work. I think it will probably be a case of ‘if at first you don’t succeed’
13. Install

Voila, you should see an icon appear next to your volume control which is your Network Manager. This will allow you to select a Network, and tweak your wireless settings.

If you are at this stage and still Ubuntu des not see your wireless USB it is time to either try another driver, or look for alternative solutions.

I could now see the wireless Networks but still could not connect?

Grr, I was trying to connect to a Secured network using the default WPA/WPA2 connection which worked fine under Windows. I found that by disabling Security on the actual Router (which makes the network unsecure and no passsword is required) I was able to connect.

This can be done by

1. creating a wired ethernet connection to your router
2. Logging into your router in your browser (mine was at http://192.168.1.1)
3. Changing the wireless security option to ‘Disabled’

This is highly unsatisfactory since it means that not only can anyone use my network, but also everything I do online can potentially be detected and intercepted and that in theory someone listening in could get my credit card details.

I spent a day messing around with the WPA settings and WEP and others but have not yet managed to connect using these protocols.

So at the moment I have just decided to risk it. I will however be looking for a solution to this asap. If anyone has any suggestions I’d love to know.

That said I am now connected wirelessly and writing this article on my shiny new Ubuntu OS – lifes good!

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.

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.

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.