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.

Maxymiser have published a paper on improving the holiday buying user process online. It's obviously a sales pitch but has some useful hints and tips that are worth a read. The paper talks about all the good stuff such as multivariate (A/B) testing which we should all be doing. Down load it here.

Nielsen has released a report which details the satisfaction of online shoppers during the last few weeks Christmas rush.

Apparently 82% of online shoppers said they either very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their online purchase experience. The top ten destinations all scored over 80% so should be very pleased with themselves.
Highly commendable that a site with the volume of visitors that Amazon receives does so well, testament to the hard work they put into their user experience.

Let's hope the travel industry can do as well in January!

Smashing Magazine today has and article looking at some of the amazing developments coming in the way we as users experience interacting with technology. The list of coming interfaces includes Microsoft Surface which I've blogged about before. User experience could change dramatically and where we are now all thinking about a flat screen we could in the future be thinking of all sorts of 3D, multi-level, complex interfaces.

Well worth a read!