The other day, I was browsing the web site of a national airline, looking for cheap fares. As I suppose most online shoppers do, I was looking for the best fare. I had done some price comparisons on one of the large travel sites, and was hoping to cut out the middle-man, and save myself a couple of dollars by purchasing from the company directly. I was floored when I discovered the site violated a principle feature of e-commerce usability: it failed to list the price of tickets until after a flight had been selected and clicked for more details. This rendered it impossible to easily compare flights. (This is also a violation of the first point in Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002.)

Incidentally, the site also set the default number of passengers to zero. (The error page also cleared all of the other information I had entered. Another e-blunder.) I wonder how many people shop for tickets for zero people? Better to default to one, and allow the customer to change the number at any time before checkout.

The end of the story? The site was difficult to use, and had a non-standard submit button that was hard to find, often separated from the primary part of the form. I ended up looking somewhere else (and found a better price). Needless to say, I will not be buying tickets online from that site anytime in the near future.

Posted in Usability