Posts tagged with 'Travel'

Designing effective map-based browsing

By Abid Warsi on 7 January 2010

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Many websites from varying sectors have some kind of geographical-based navigation, whether it’s a travel website, an estate agents’ site or even the store locator function on a retail website. The question is how to offer this functionality. Some sites offer map-based browsing, but often it’s not used heavily as it’s not easy-to-use. I’ve come across a few sites like this recently and it reminded of some previous tips I wrote for our newsletter on how to design effective map-based browsing.

Start from a high level and allow customers to drill-down

It’s important with map-based browsing to start from a high-level map view (e.g. the whole world or the whole of the UK). Users should then be given large, labelled areas to click on, such as countries, then regions, then cities, etc. During this process you must make each area a single hotspot with a mouse over effect to make it appear clickable.

Add further detail for customers who want specific places

It’s very common for travel customers to already know the specific city or region that they want to visit, or even the specific resort. To best cater for these customers you must provide an alternative way to find a destination, such as a dropdown list of the most popular destinations. In addition, you should consider adding landmarks at the most detailed map level e.g. town names or major roads to allow users to pinpoint their destination.

Remember to offer a way back

Chances are that customers will want to look at a number of destinations within a particular region. It’s no good making users start a new search every time they want to look at another destination. Instead you should give them a way to zoom out to the previous page.

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Retrospective BA miles claims hinder online experience

By Jon White on 15 December 2009

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British Airways might have enough problems at the moment what with making big financial losses and reports that its cabin crew have voted nine to one in favour of striking over the Christmas period. Nevertheless, I’d like to talk about a shortcoming I encountered deep within its website, specifically in the Executive Club section.British Airways plane

Firstly I feel I must insert a caveat here that I’m not knocking BA’s website as a whole, as it provides a very good user experience and actually topped Webcredible’s 2009 Flights Online Report. However, the problem I encountered came when looking to attribute BA miles to a previous flight.

When it comes to joining BA’s Executive Club and collecting miles, I’m guessing many people do it in the way I did – booked a flight, realised you could claim the miles, and signed up to collect them retrospectively – and it’s the retrospective element that I feel is slightly flawed!

Obviously if you’re a member when you book a flight, you use your frequent flyer number upon booking and the miles are added automatically when you’ve flown. When looking to add miles for previously taken flights however, I expected to see a clear link in the ‘Manage my account’ section, but that unfortunately wasn’t the case. The left-hand navigation is actually very well laid out, but it’s really not immediately clear where the required section would be.

After a good few minutes of searching I did find it in the ‘Collecting BA miles’ section, under the ‘Flights’ sub-menu, right at the bottom of the main content on the page, with the link text ‘More about claiming missing BA miles’. Now in hindsight, this does seem like a logical location, but for new users it can be very hard to find and surely should be promoted much more actively (as they are the users likely to need this facility).

I admit this is a minor point when it comes to the overall user experience of a very good website. But, when it comes to recruiting new members to its Executive Club, this point could be important for BA.

Given the partnerships between airlines to gain rewards for one airline from flights on another (I’ve accumulated most of my BA miles on Cathay Pacific flights for example), customers don’t have to join BA’s Executive Club to gain rewards on BA flights, and herein lies the point. If users have trouble claiming the miles on retrospective flights on BA’s website then they may simply head to another airline’s site and use its reward scheme instead.

Photo credit:  lrargerich via Flickr / Creative commons

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Online travel journal tool could develop into a must for travellers

By Frankie Pagnacco on 3 November 2009

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In a previous post I talked about communicating with those back home while travelling and how in the 90s this relied on the solidness of postcards, letters and phone calls. The audience for these was, by necessity, rather small - family and a couple of envious best friends.

Ekit online postcardNow, my brother is on a one-year overland trip and I, along with the world, can trace his every mile thanks to his ekit.com online travel journal. From the journal I can send him a text, call him, post comments on his entries, see his current location on a zoomable Google map and find out whether his phone is on or off.

It all works through a SIM card and he can make live updates to his journal from his phone or PC all time-stamped to pins on the map. Everything is reciprocally integrated with Twitter, Facebook and his blog. The added benefit is that when I ring him it’s just the cost of a local UK mobile call and also free to him in most of the countries he’s visited so far. All useful stuff.

On the down side of this beta version, the interface and a lot of the interactions are not very user friendly. For instance, previous and back buttons face the wrong way. The interaction ‘make a call’ actually works as ‘request a call back’ so why not name the button that way. And the journal entries themselves are preceded by too much pre-bumph like ‘Paris 18 Buttes-Montmartre, France. This is in Paris, France’ spaced over two lines.

From my brother’s point of view, as a user, the sign-in doesn’t remember him and he has found some of the set-up pages unintuitive and difficult to learn.

But on the whole it’s been really useful to know where he is and read his updates and there are some nice touches like the email I get when he makes an update is an image of a postcard. With more user-centred development this could turn into a slick, dependable service. Not to mention every mother’s gap year dream.

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Better user experience can help travel industry survive downturn

By Alexander Baxevanis on 30 April 2009

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Fasten seatbelt while seated

We often get asked how companies can best use their online presence to minimise the effects of the downturn. While there’s no silver bullet that works in any kind of business, some helpful ideas for the travel sector come from a recent (29 April 2009) presentation by the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) & accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Their “guide for surviving the downturn” was mostly presented from a financial management perspective, but it’s easy to see how much of their advice is actually related to the user experience of online travel booking:

  • PwC advised businesses to “take a closer look at changing booking patterns” and understand not just what customers do but also why. Conducting user research is one way to uncover such insights, especially given that what customers say they do is not always what they actually do.
  • Customers choosing to book later than usual is having a considerable impact on travel agents, who traditionally count on receiving payments well in advance of delivering a holiday. Last time we looked into how people research & book holidays online, we found that many websites didn’t do as much as they could to convince customers to book early rather than postpone their decision.
  • Businesses were also urged to manage their cost base and evaluate the impact of their distribution methods i.e. their call centres or websites. Can travel agents still afford to have consumers getting confused on their wesbite and having to ring a call centre to complete a transaction or resolve an issue?

One of the questions that inevitably came up at the end of the presentation was whether there’s still room for innovation in the current economic climate. The answer was quite straightforward: “Don’t stop innovating, don’t forget your brand, and have an eye for the future”. According to PwC, there are winners and losers in each recession, and those who can continue to invest & innovate to create a better user experience are usually among the winners.

Photo credit: specialkrb (via Flickr/Creative Commons)

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