Dana’s user experience blog

I’ve been thinking about why airlines have been on this blog so often of late, and I have come to the conclusion that it must be because I travel more often than average, and small things that might not be annoying if they only affected me once a year have been affecting me roughly once a month for the past four months.

This time it is an airline booking website that has frustrated me, and (worse) wasted my time (which is, after all, the only thing in life that is completely irreplaceable, once spent).  I tried to book a domestic flight on Air New Zealand, and thus went to the local New Zealand website.  I searched for a flight, found an appropriate flight time and price, and tried to book the flight using Airpoints dollars.  After being redirected through a log-in page, I was shown the following error message:

When I clicked the continue button, it took me to the Australian site, but it had not passed on the search or selections I had made on the New Zealand site, so I had to perform that search over again (and then when I did, the prices presented were quoted in New Zealand dollars and the Australian price did not show until I had selected a flight).  There is no way I could have known this in advance, because there is no standard for which regional variant of an airline website users should use (Qantas insists you use the website of the country where your flight will originate, Air New Zealand likes you to use the site where you live, for example), and nowhere on the Air New Zealand website does it actually say which variant to use.

There are two problems with this scenario:

1. I am not Australian, and there is no reason for my Airpoints membership to think I am.  The membership was created in New Zealand, and it has me registered as a New Zealand passport holder.  Now, I am not patriotic, and I don’t particularly care about a website calling me Australian, but the text is misleading and could actively confuse some users (or seriously annoy users more patriotic than me). It should read “Airpoints members resident in Australia…” (because the sole reason it thinks I am an Australian is my address.
2. The website did not (though this is a technically easy feat) pass on what I was trying to do — I landed on a search screen on the Australian web-site and had to begin the booking process again from the start.  At best this is annoying and a waste of my time, at worst it could have meant I missed out on fast-selling sale fares.

Nowhere on any of the Air New Zealand websites does it tell you that you must book through your local version if you want to use your Airpoints membership to provide your information, accumulate points, or spend your accumulated points, nor does it use the IP address of your computer (the number your computer identifies by on the internet) to redirect you before you begin searching.  This is an easy error to make, and the time cost in recovering from it is relatively high (the two minutes it might take to make a booking basically doubles, given that the user has to start over).  Air New Zealand has ample opportunities to prevent this “error” (I find it hard to call reasonable user behaviour an error), and also to make it easier for users to recover from the error without costing them a lot of time.

Errors are something that should be considered in the design of any interactive system — both how to make it harder for user to make them, and how to make it easier for user to recover when they do make them — and Air New Zealand has failed in this.  Are there any systems you make mistakes in all the time?  It might not be your fault.

Again I have left this blog too long without a post, and again it is because I have been travelling. As much as I used to love to travel, I am now throughly sick of it — sick of waiting in airport lounges and lines, sick of the poor design of systems that require me to fill out a card when there could be a machine that scanned my passport and boarding card (if you really need my signature, how about I just sign my boarding card?), sick of trying to decide if kohl pencil counts as a liquid (it doesn’t) and sick of answering the question “have you got any liquids aerosols or gels in your carry on?” with the cumbersome “yes, and it is packed in a clear 1l plastic bag”. Many of these irritations could be dramatically reduced by better systems, and in many cases, I could fly business class to reduce my aggravation.

Business class/first class on airlines really are the ultimate sale of a user experience, as opposed to a user necessity, for the vast majority of passengers; the extra movies, better food, and real cutlery are all nice, but they don’t help you to do business any better at the other end. I can’t find any statistics on how many passengers who are flying business class are actually on business, but my guess would be less than half. And lets face it, with business class travellers making up only 10% of travellers, but 35% of revenue (at least in the US), it makes sense to keep the business class passengers happy.

One of the privileges business class passengers get is the exclusive use of a set of toilets for their class. Generally speaking, given that they pay twice what a economy class passenger has paid, this is only appropriate. However, I recently flew back to Australia from New Zealand on the Air New Zealand Airbus A320,and the layout of the plane meant that not only did some economy passengers use the business class toilets, those who didn’t were involved in serious interruptions to service, and a general health hazard.

The A320 has 8 business class seats, and 144 economy class seats. There is one business class toilet right at the front of the plane, and two economy class toilets, both in the tail section (yes, this means that there is one toilet per 72 economy class passengers — this is less than is recommended for restaurants in the American Restroom Code (PDF), though more than is recommended for passenger terminals). There is a single centre aisle, with three seats on either side in economy class, and it’s pretty narrow. You can see a diagram of the plane layout here. Now, the flight I was on was completely full, and as always, the flight attendants began the economy class food and beverage services from the front of the plane — same with tray collection. You can see where this is all going to go wrong: given that the cart was blocking the aisle, and passengers were not allowed to go forward (though some of them did anyway, including one elderly and disabled lady), access to the toilets was severely limited for the majority of passengers for the majority of the flight. Passengers who did need to go could access the back of the plane by having the flight attendants wheel the cart back to the galley, squeezing past it, and going thus seriously interrupting service and coming very close to the food that was being served to other passengers. Once the aisle was finally cleared, there was a significant line of people waiting, all out of their seats and definitely not wearing seatbelts, which puts those passengers (and the people seated around them) at greater risk of injury (and it was nearly made illegal in the wake of 9/11). What’s more, with the prevalence of moderate urinary incontinence at a minimum of 3% among men and women, this had a high probability of causing someone discomfort and/or embarrassment.

It’s all very well to sell an excellent user experience to your business class passengers, who pay more. It’s not appropriate, however, to create barriers to accessing necessary facilities to uphold the exclusivity of this experience. Air New Zealand, and indeed any airline using this aircraft in this configuration needs to consider either offering economy class passengers access to the business class toilets or designing the cabin space so there is alternative access to the back of the cabin or a toilet at the front. Selling a great user experience at a premium is a good idea, but not if it compromises the health, safety, and basic comfort of your other users.

My apologies that this blog has lain fallow for so long; life gets in the way of good writing far more than the truth gets in the way of a good story I am afraid. Part of the reason why I have been conspicuously absent, however, has been a trip home to New Zealand, both to spend Christmas with my family, and to get on top of a number of things that needed to be taken care of for my wedding.

Of course, because user experience is “what I do” I reflected on the poor user experience that the modern traveller has come to accept as the norm on a number of occasions (warning: don’t do this, being angry at how simple it would be to make things better will only make the way you feel now worse). Much of that poor experience has to do with standing in line — to check in, to clear customs, to clear security, to get on the plane, to get off the plane, to clear customs, to collect your bags, to clear biosecurity (New Zealand and Australia, at least)… It’s fairly endless, and in combination with security restrictions (and the people who don’t follow them) is the main reason why the minimum check-in time for New Zealand to Australia is now exceeding the flight time in some cases (having said that, it seems in most cases that if you show up late they come looking for you anyway — “anyone for the flight to Nadi?”).

Of course, some of these lines can be reduced or eliminated by self-service (and this is happening in some cases, notably with self-check-in), but I’m not going to talk about that. What I am going to talk about is the Auckland airport departure fee.

When you leave New Zealand via Auckland Airport, there is a $25 NZ departure fee that is payable at the airport. I’m not complaining about the fee itself, which is relatively low (departure fees from most Australian airports are around the $200 mark, but since they are collected by the airlines they are hidden in the cost of your ticket). However, paying the fee is an annoying step in the process of exiting Auckland Airport, which is the major airport in New Zealand. The real problem, though, is that the Auckland Airport management team have just made the decision to allow Travelex to collect the fee, when it used to be collected by the Bank of New Zealand. This means that travellers can no longer pay their departure fee at an ATM, the way they used to, but must now line up for yet another thing leaving the airport — it might mean the airport gets a few cents more of the fee, but it is significantly inconvenient for every single passenger (in a way that raising the fee might not have been).

Sadly, much like Microsoft and personal computing, Auckland Airport has a near-monopoly on the New Zealand international travel market, and so the market has little choice but to bear this great leap backwards in user experience. Still, though, I am seriously thinking about selling my shares in Auckland Airport, if only I can figure out how to do it…

Recently I had the displeasure of doing something that should have been very pleasant — booking my flights back to New Zealand for my wedding. A friend of my gave me the heads up that there was an especially cheap flight with Emirates around the time I wanted to go, so I duly went ahead and attempted to book the flight.

The process of booking this flight — a simple flight, only a single leg — took over an hour and a half. Partly this was because the Emirates website was painfully slow, but partly it was user interface issues. When I made an error entering the dates I wanted to travel (and I discovered this near the end of the process) I had to go back and completely start the process over — there was no way to change the travel date. When I made an error with the seats I selected I was kicked back to the personal information screen, where some of the information had reverted to the default. And when I made an error entering my credit card details, the booking failed irrevocably (while saving the incorrect details to a customer profile that could not be accessed because the server was down). When I tried to start the booking afresh, I was trapped with the bad credit card details, and was offered the choice of collecting the tickets from an Emirates office, or having them mailed to me — no e-ticket for me. In the end, we logged in with my partner’s account and booked the tickets that way, but as I said, at this point it was 90 minutes later.

I tell you this story not to deride Emirates, who are, after all, flying me to NZ for an absolute pittance, but because whenever I book with an airline, the user experience is near-universally bad. I haven’t yet found an Australian website that searches as many airlines as House of Travel in New Zealand, but when I do, I won’t be booking directly with the airlines again — travel agents know their websites have to actually offer a service if they want people to come back, and so the user experience is much, much better.