23 Musings

I've blogged a couple of times recently (here and here) about declining levels of customer satisfaction with online travel websites. Now another survey reports their declining further.

Detail is here at Hotelmarketing.com but in a nutshell this seems to suggest that the old model of 'booking engine only' websites is losing favour as users want a richer, more immersive and customer focused experience rather than simply a one size fits all approach to buying travel online.

The online travel industry has dropped 1.3% as a whole, Expedia lost 3.8% and now scores 75 (the highest).

The next generation of travel websites can't be far away, hopefully the advances in technology will allow customer satisfaction to be dramatically improved through the use of advanced usability techniques, customer profiling and tools which enable rather than just sell, sell, sell.

So says the usability guru Jakob Nielsen in his latest article.

He says that the returns from usability have lessened in recent times due to the fact that websites just aren't as bad as they used to be. Big pat on the back for all designers and developers out there but don't get complacent! Usability is hugely important and should never be underestimated, small tweaks to the user experience can often result in huge returns.

Another reason he gives for slowing ROI is that usability budgets have not grown in line with other budgets and that there still isn't enough importance placed on usability studies and testing.

Great post from Jakob Nielsen on the dangers of going web 2.0 crazy from a usability point of view!

Highly poingant as we're implementing a lot of AJAX at the moment. Overkill is deadly and could trash your conversion rate. Keep it minimal, useful, effective (AJAX is great for some things, pointless for others), simple, usable and give clear instructions where needed.

I agree with his pitch on user generated content as well. Pointless if your audience/customers aren't ready for it or if you have nothing interesting for them to talk about (that said, great in an emotive environment such as online travel if used wisely).

One of the things I found really strange when I started in the travel industry a few years ago was where in the year the peak booking periods occur. I'd been used to working on e-commerce projects in industries which either had steady purchase patterns, peaks prior to christmas in retails or really pronounced peaks in B2B markets (renewals periods etc). Travel however peaks at two times of the year (as far as I can tell anyway) and is fairly steady the rest of the time.

It's not the the fact that it peaks twice that I found strange, rather it's when those peaks occur.

The first peak travel booking period I encountered was in July and August. This was mainly late bookings for the autumn and winter period and consisted of a lot of people looking for bargains and breaks to the sun. This struck me as an odd time to have a peak in bookings. It's perfectly understandable for people to be booking such holidays at that time of year, a lot had just come back from holiday and were looking forward to the next and others are in the midst of the school holidays and wondering what to do with the kids during autumn half-term. I just didn't expect the volumes that occured.

The second peak I encountered is the more pronounced one in January and February. Now this seemed really odd to me. Christmad just out the way, major expenditure has happened in nearly every household and yet here were consumers planning and purchasing holidays for next summer with price tags in the thousands. I can understand the winter blues effect but it still seems alien to me that this is the period which can see an online travel company make it through the year if bookings are succesful at this time.

So what to expect this year?

Economically it's not looking so good this year. Consumer confidence has been dented by the current market instability and disposable cash is not going to be as readily available to some. This could result in some companies seeing less growth year-on-year than in previous peak seasons. This could work in the favour of tour operators who take deposit payments to secure bookings and allow consumers to pay the rest off in installments. The online travel agents will be the ones who feel the pinch (if indeed there is one) as they expect full payment up front for all bookings.

Traffic is well up though. Currently, traffic to online travel websites is up 15-20% year-on-year, that trend should continue into the peak months and could be more evidence of the continued shift to online booking channels in the travel marketplace. It's also testament to the maturing of the online marketing activities of travel companies. I hope you've got your infrastructure sorted out or the rush of visitors to your sites could make them grind to a halt unless you're prepared!

Bookings so far this year are also up with the industry as a whole seeing far more bookings going through on their websites. Again, this should continue into the peak months.

So all in all we should see a decent peak period again this year. It's at this time of the year that e-commerce teams in the travel industry are optimising their websites, performing last minute usability, launching new functionality and expanding their hosting capacity in order to be in peak condition for January. It's a really busy time for us but the effort will be well worth it when January comes and you can reap the benefits.

A succesful January can make or break a travel company and preparing your online channel for this could be the activity with the single highest ROI that you undertake this year!

Less is more it would seem when it comes to search interfaces. Just look at Google to see the less-is-more approach at it's best. Their minimal approach to the search homepage works really well, although I do think a big reason for that is that their algorithm is much better at returning relevant results with minimal input from the user.

Prof. John Maeda of MIT Media Lab had put together an interesting image showing the development of both Google and Yahoo's homepage over time. It's really interesting to see how Yahoo lost their way and Google stayed true to the minimal approach. Click the image below to see a full size version:

So online travel is motoring along as ever. Sales are rising and the number of participant websites is growing all the time. However, in the U.S. the word (courtesy the NY Times) is that 9 percent fewer people booked travel online this year than in 2005. This has come from a Forrester research survey of 60,000 U.S. web users. It is the first time since Forrester began tracking Internet spending a decade ago that a category (in this case online travel) has lost shoppers.

Another survey (results coming soon) from PhoCusWright shows that the percentage of travel shoppers booking online has dipped while the percentage booking offline has risen.

Is this something to be concerned about? Maybe. There's a few reasons this could be happening. Perhaps customers are looking to book more and more complex trips, and therefore aren't booking online as they feel the confidence instilled by a travel agent is necessary before parting with money for an adventurous trip. Or perhaps users are beginning to backlash against the standard online travel functionalities that haven't changed much in the last ten years.

Henry Harteveldt, Forrester’s online travel analyst says “Customers are tired of spending two or three hours trying to find the airline or hotel or vacation package that meets their needs.” He says (like I do) that sites need to step away from asking for specifics in order to complete a search. He says “Nowhere can you say, ‘I have this amount of money to spend on a trip. These are my interests. This is where I live. Show me my options,’” he said. “Whereas online retailers have done a much better job of improving the shopping experience in recent years, the travel industry has been standing still.”

The NY Times article goes on to discuss the lack of innovation that is due to outdated reservation systems and mentions the Travelocity Road Trip Wizard I discussed earlier. Yes, lack of functionality in reservation systems is a major issue, also the technological complexity of querying multiple bed banks and GDS' makes user intuitive searching almost impossible to create.

So, who is going to be in a position to benefit from this trend of user/customer decline? It could be the tour operators. Many of them are in the process of upgrading their systems to new dynamic package capable ones which will interface much better with intelligent search functionality. Also, they don't need to query the bed banks as often as they have contracted bed stock so can cache availability and present it in a much more usability focussed manner than the likes of Expedia with their multi-connections to other suppliers. Of course the only problem is the lack of innovation generally at tour operators and also the desire they seem to have to become the next Expedia. That's not the way forwards anymore. Rather than trying to emulate the online travel agents, tour operators should be trying to become the next big thing.

Everyones seen the price graphs generated by the likes of Farecast which predict airfares over a period of time, and we've all seen the calendar based booking flows from BA and Virgin Atlantic.
They're all great (Farecast especially) but they aren't the most user friendly designs going.

What I've always looked for in a good online travel experience (as well as a usable, intuitive booking flow, inspiring content etc) is user friendly ways to display price trends integrated into product content as well as after entering specific dates etc.

Now Hotels.com have released a new piece of functionality on their U.S. website which shows price trends in a really easy to interpret manner. They've implemented interactive hotel rate calendars which show prices by day in a calendar format and colour coded so users can easily spot the best times to book.

The image above shows an open rate calendar for a specific hotel.

It's a really nicely implemented piece of functionality but the one thing that's wrong is that I have to specify the date and party size before I can view it. I'd like to see this being available without entering the dates so I can browse the hotels and see a rough guide price (maybe for a standard room with 2 adults) displayed over a year. That would really be useful!

It strikes me that tour operators could use this to help their price sensitive customers find their best deals too. Package (dirty word) holidays are often priced the same over long periods so being able to see colour coded heat maps of the year showing price fluctuation would be a great value add to any tour operators website. Wonder who'll be first to do it?

Really good insight as ever from usability expert Jakob Nielsen here. In this article he discusses whats known as banner blindness, the fact that users are often oblivious to the presence of banner adverts on the web. The study he's undertaken involved eyetracking and the results are pretty conclusive.

The findings show that designing banner ads which supposedly stand out as they are different colours and using borders is actually a false economy and you are better off integrating your advertising into a websites content. Users tend to avoid focusing on objects that look very different from the site design, often hardly glancing at them and rarely clicking. Google are an example of someone who's got this just right in their implementation of Adwords. As everyone knows, one of the main reasons Adwords works so well is that users rarely identify them as any different to a natural search result.

It's something I've always suspected as users always respond better to cohesive designs where all the elements of a website hang together and complement each other. We recently redesigned our homepage and one of the elements was a promo banner displaying a 'book online and save' message. In the new design this is just a textual message on the screen as opposed to a bordered banner, and traffic to that page has doubled since the design changed!

Here's a really interesting paper from Usability News detailing the top ten mistakes websites make with e-commerce shopping cart design and implementation.

If usability and user centered design are your thing then you should read this. The top ten items are taken from an article resulting from a survey in 2002 and have been updated to take into account how online retailers have responded to usability issues in the shopping and check out process.

There's some lessons to be learned for even the most experienced interface designer here!

Good article on the BBC website citing Jakob Nielsens comments regarding the state of web design today and it's impact on users. Jakob says that the hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design and said that the rush to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served. He said sites peppered with personalisation tools were in danger of resembling the "glossy but useless" sites at the height of the dotcom boom.

Valid points by Mr Nielsen, but I believe this is just indicative of a boom (yes the web is booming). There are so many people trying to jump into the online arena that many are bound to overlook the basics, also with so many design firms out there more of them are going to be of a lower quality (same as happened in the dotcom boom). There will always be badly designed sites, and with the temptation to add endless filters, widgets and features there will be many mistakes made along the way.

Don't fall into the trap of adding features for features sake, make them useful and usable if you want customers to keep coming back!

ZenZui is a new mobile phone interface being developed by a company which came out of Microsoft Research and now runs independently although funded by Microsoft's IP Ventures.

They've created a zoomable interface for mbile phones which is looking pretty good from the demo video they've created.

Designed by experts in human computer interaction it really does look like a step forwards in how we can access information on the small screen. Just looking at the demo video shows me that the interface has the potential to remove a lot of the frustrations that I come across while browsing the web on my N73.

Check out the demo below:

When it's time to redesign or tweak your e-commerce website what areas should you focus on? Is it just a matter of rebuilding from scratch or applying a new coat of paint? Or are there key areas you should be focusing on?

Help is at hand... Jakob Nielsen, that bastion of usability and helpful tips (although I know some people don't agree with everything he says and I'm one of them) has published a new article titled 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities.

There's some really good points on where you should focus your efforts so this is well worth a read for anyone who wants to increase their conversion rate and get more revenue.

It's not very often I find a book that while being of interest from a web point of view also refers directly to the industry I am a part of. 'Designing Emotions in Online Travel', published by Sotopia, seems from the extract to be a really relevant read for anyone from designers to strategists in the online travel world.

It's been written by some usability experts (which always bodes well for me) and touches on the methods by which we can convey the emotion involved in a travel research/booking process to the user through a web experience. It's highly pertinent to me at this time when I am assessing the potential for a redesign of our front end. Being able to give the user the same emotional experience they get by flicking through the pages of a brochure or stepping into a travel agent is vitally important (and something many of the online travel agents neglect completely).

Needless to say I've ordered my copy.

Kuoni has launched it's new website in the last few days. The rumours were that it was supposed to go live before Xmas but got delayed due to how busy the first few weeks of January are. Although I do work for a competitor (of sorts) I thought I'd give it a brief review...

My first impressions were how much more usable it is than their old site, it's a vast improvement and should really impact their numbers booked online. The new homepage is clean and uncluttered, contains easy to understand navigation and a booking form (the first time they've had a booking form on the homepage!) I really like what they've done with this page. They have easy ways to navigate through their products; by type of holiday, by destination and (for the traditionalists) by brochure making it really easy to find what you are looking for. A new special offers section is clearly marked and easy to find although the way the offers are listed isn't particularly easy to scan. Promotional area on the homepage is minimal at the moment however it's obvious that they could expand downwards as the page is not very long at the moment and as we all know the old 'below the fold' argument doesn't hold as much weight as it used to (with screen sizes growing by the day). The markup is looking good and I really like the fact they've used more space and allowed the width of the site to be fluid according to browser width.

Usability is much improved and from a quick glance at the code accessibility looks much better than the old site too!

All in all it's a massive improvement! Top marks to the Kuoni web team, I'd expect the 15% booked online that they currently quote will jump quite quickly.

Microsoft have released a redesigned homepage on their main corporate website. It is literally just their homepage that's changed, the rest of the site is as it has ever been.

The redesigned homepage looks much better, the layout is much more up to date and they've obviously taken notice of current design, colour and layout trends.

However, this keeping up with the latest trends looks to have been taken a little too far! They've really tried to emulate the Web2.0 crew by stuffing a clunky AJAX navigation module into the page. It's a nice bit of navigation but is incredibly slow to load, in Firefox 2.0 it is so slow and caused the browser to hang while loading meaning you couldn't switch to another tab or use any other browser features. It's slightly better in IE7 but only marginally, the speed is still slower than I'd expect for any piece of website navigation.

The speed of the nav is verging on being so slow it's unusable, it made me want to find another site to find the info I was looking for straight away. Of course, being Microsoft, chances are the info you want may only be on their website so you may have no choice but to persevere...

My opinion? Top marks for trying to bring their homepage up to date, zero for execution.

E-Consultancy reports from Le Web 3 with comments from Danny Rimmer of Index Ventures (a venture funding firm who backed the likes of Last.fm and Spotrunner). Danny said: "What I am concerned about is that it seems everyone wants to start a company instead of just surrounding an idea and going after it. When you have mutiple companies going after the same opportunity, things are not going to work out for everyone."

Not exactly insight of the year, but a valid point and one that all the web 2.0 bandwagon jumpers should heed before they churn out another social news, video sharing or niche community site. Follow some basic rules to make sure your web 2.0 site/service gets the attention it deserves:

1. Try and come up with something different.
2. Make sure it really is useful (a lot of web 2.0 sites really don't have all that much value for the end users).
   
3. Don't enter a market that is saturated with well funded opposition unless you really have found something totally unique (and hopefully in demand) to offer.
4. Do your research; find out who else is doing something similar, find out how much traffic may be available to you, get good estimates for market size etc (helps for approaching VC's too).
5. Do some usability testing; even if it's just your mates/Dad/grandparents. Too many services are being launched which don't seem to have taken into account the fact that real people, some of whom won't be web savvy will be the target audience.
   

Nomensa, in my opinion the best usability/accessibility consultancy in the UK (and thoroughly nice guys), have completed a study of major websites worldwide to look at how many of them meet the most basic of the WCAG guidelines.

This article on the BBC states that only three websites of 100 tested made the minimum grade.

The report, commissioned by the United Nations, can be requested here.

Some of the findings include:

• 93% of sites tested did not provide adequate text descriptions for graphical content, causing problems for visually impaired people;
• 78% used foreground and background colour combinations with poor contrast, making it difficult for people with mild visual conditions such as colour blindness to read information;
• 98% did not follow industry web standards for the programming code, providing poor foundations for web accessibility;
• 89% failed to use the correct technique for conveying document structure through the use of headings, making page navigation awkward for many visually impaired people;
• 87% caused pop-up windows to appear without warning the user, causing disorientation problems for people using screen magnification software;
• 97% used link text that did not clearly indicate the destination of the link, causing confusion for people with learning difficulties;
• 92% did not provide a keyboard shortcut allowing people to bypass large blocks of content, causing difficulty and frustration for people with physical impairments.
  

Disappointing that so few have made the grade, you'd hope that more major websites would make the grade now, I mean the web has been around for a long time now! Come on website owners, let's make the web a more inclusive place to browse!

I've been designing and building interfaces and websites since 1995, with all that experience under my belt you'd think I'd be one of those people who are averse to usability testing and happy to just use my own experience and knowledge to get the user interface right. I'm not!

Back in 1998 I created a portal for a segment of the financial services market. It was aimed at key decision makers within the insurance industry, so not the most web savvy or computer literate people in those days. We decided to perform our own user testing using the HCI students from the local university as facilitators for the sessions. The sessions went incredibly well, the feedback we gained was so useful it either validated our design decisions or gave us ideas for how to tweak and change things to get a better experience for our target audience. This experience has firmly rooted the idea of testing with live users in the development cycle of any project I am involved in.

Last week I went to a usability lab to test some prototype screens of a new development. I'd never seen prototypes tested before so was a bit dubious about how it would work. I'm used to having a nearly finished article for users to click there way through, I couldn't see how we could get as much value from testing flat prototype images.

I was very wrong! The usability company were fantastic and the way they facilitated the sessions made all the difference. We sat and watched the users being talked through a journey on the site and it answered so many questions we had and validated so many others. I really can't recommend getting your websites tested enough!

One word of caution though; usability companies work at their best doing usability testing. They will offer to review your designs etc but this is really not where they add the most value. The value is gained by having live users working their way through a journey on your new site and using the usability experts to facilitate and summarise the results. That's what the usability companies are good at!

6 days to go until World Usability Day 2006. This is a cause that is worth shouting about by all web developers, designers and strategists. It's an opportunity to get usability on the radar at your organisation, something that can be very difficult to do!

This year the tag line is 'making life easy', something that even some supposed usability specialists seem to have forgotten, too often usability becomes a case of papering over the cracks in a project, if people think about keeping it simple from the start it is easy to make sure you end up with a usable end result!

There's a list of events by country so visit the site and get involved!

Microsoft has now released IE7 as a high priority update, so expect penetration to increase dramatically over the next week or so. Now is the time we will see how ready all you webmasters are!

I posted some weeks ago about being prepared for IE7 and ensuring your website was compatible with no adverse effects on layout and style. I suggested that there was no need to panic as long as your site was built well and adhered to basic standards.

It seems that a lot of large companies weren't quite up to speed! Etre (a fantastic usability company I've had the pleasure of working alongside) have done a bit of digging to see just how ready people are. The article on their blog shows that a lot of large audience sites were caught out. Of particular note (and a particular surprise to me) were the likes of bank Alliance & Leicester, Lloyds TSB and Northern Rock. With large audiences and facilities such as online banking you'd have thought they'd have ensured preparedness. But no...

Etre's article is well worth a look as it contains screenshots showing the differences between IE6 and IE7. None of it looks too major but I'm sure some wrists will have been slapped for failing to be ready.