It’s 2010, websites are no longer something you have to have because it’s the done thing. Websites today must be a driver of activity and business, not a peripheral piece of your organization. That is acutely true if you happen to be selling through your website. In such cases it is imperative that your web presence be geared towards the end user – usability is king. Some airline websites do this well, some do it not so well and some are downright awful.
Since I seem to spend a lot of time researching and booking flights I thought it was time to write a review. For the purposes of this review I have chosen to critique WestJet.com. In my estimation (as somebody who travels a lot and ALWAYS books online) I would have to say WestJet.com falls into the middle of the pack – not great, not terrible. Let’s go to the landing Page.
OK not a good start. I’m told that my browser (Google Chrome) is not optimal. Two points in response to this:
- If you have to display this message make it small and discrete. There’s no need to alarm surfers with a wordy message and an obfuscated screen.
- Chrome and Safari may both be relatively small players but they are not a huge departure from Firefox and Internet Explorer. Get compatible. The cost of doing so is tiny, the upside is not.
[Update: Wow! In the time since I started this review and now WetJet look to have switched to a new browser detection mechanism that makes the previous gripe redundant.
Update 2: The nag screen is back. Odd.]
Post-nag screen is a confusing landing page.
WestJet.com - current landing page
There needs to be some space between the regular passenger click path and everyone/everything else. Also why is it that not everything is in two languages? No French speaking business travelers? This click flow is broken. It should be 1) pick a language to reveal a second tier then 2) pick from options available based on language selection.
WestJet.com - suggest landing page layout
So far it’s been fairly smooth sailing but once we get to the main page things start to come apart.
WestJet.com - current home page
There is simply too much blue, too much text and too much clutter – can you even count the number of links on this page? There are over 150 links here in one place or another – that’s lunacy. Depending on whose research you believe, humans can handle 8 or less variables at a time when solving a problem. 150? Not so much.
Since this page should be driving business, the booking area and the special fares area should take prominence in that order, but they don’t. A quick use of the black and white test reveals that the most prominent areas of this page are…
WestJet.com - black and white test
two clunky blue bars containing links that take you away from the main page? These two bars are nested in blocks containing clouds but for some reason the sky is a different shade of blue in each. The lack of consistency doesn’t stop there. For instance some of the “[+]” symbols are clickable, some of them aren’t. That degree of oversight is amateur.
Then there’s the dead weight; the travel advisory is not eye catching enough and frankly looks like another oversight. Also the newest advisory is from May 1st 2010 – three months ago. If there is no advisory to give, lose the advisory link. I wish the dead weight ended there but it doesn’t. Both the Firefox and IE icons link to the FAQ page. My question is why? Browser management is already handled upon entry making both links pointless. The Visa and MasterCard images are also pointless until a transaction is happening. These images mean nothing and only serve to further clutter the page.
If I had to specify the one thing about this site I would change first, it would without question be the behavior of the text boxes in which users are supposed to specify their origin and destination. When you click the “To” or “From” boxes a horrible wine list of destinations blankets the page.
WestJet.com - current booking textboxes
This is obviously a relic of the WestJet of old; the WestJet that didn’t fly to 71 destinations. Simply disabling this behavior would be a huge step forward. The boxes already use an AJAX subset search algorithm that displays possible matches based on typed text. That is the way forward. Oh and while you’re removing things let’s get rid of the country headers in the search results!
Beyond all of the above there are a number of other things I don’t get. For instance I have never, ever seen a vanity number follow its numeric representation. Why then does 1-888-westjet follow and not precede 1-888-937-8538? I think this oversight perfectly depicts the problem with this page it just hasn’t been thought through properly.
The good news for WestJet is that with just a few core changes this site could go from being a 6.5/10 to a 9/10. Get on it guys!
