One of the forgotten facets of User Experience is that User Experience is everything on the website — the writing, the usability. It’s also if the site works from a functionality standpoint, and if there are system issues that don’t allow the user to complete a task, that’s a poor User Experience.
I ran into an issue at the Virgin America site — I tried to upgrade a seat from a premium to first class at check-in (which, by the way, is only a $50 upgrade on the day of the flight). My friends have been recommending the airline, so I decided to give it a try, because the price wasn’t much different than Alaska.
The issues were:
System issues like this are just as frustrating to the user as poor usability; users don’t know why things are going wrong, and sometimes assume that it’s something they did. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen during usability testing where a user would hit reset when hitting a javascript popup dialog.
Testing of a site is especially important if the site is an e-commerce site, like Virgin America, because it directly hits the bottom line. It’s all about ROI, baby.
The one usability issue I saw with the site was the color of the buttons (actually, the lack of color):
That continue button is really hard to spot. I would have made it dark gray (all the positives that color), to move the user along). The placement of the buttons was correct (positive to the right).
I do know that this site was designed by an agency (they were probably built the site also, and most agencies don’t have a lot of technical talent). Sometimes the look of a site should not take precidence over the usability of the site, especially when it comes to buttons.
On a good note, Virgin America honored the upgrade and did a wonderful job with their customer service, and the website had one important link — a mail to — so I could email the issue to their web team. I commend them for doing things the right way!
QuickTip: Label the not-so-obvious, giving some kind of indicator what it is with help text and or a label.
Metroblogging is a great site — localized blogs in 54 cities around the world, and they have a map that shows where the cities are. It would be great if i actually knew what the cities were if I hovered over them.
That’s really easy to fix: just add a label next to the city ball, and this would become a much, more usable Flash map.
Even with icons, there should always be some kind of label that indicates what the item is. Users don’t want to have to guess what it is, and even obvious items like folder items aren’t so obvious.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
