Among my favourite enhancements were three that I felt stongly were missing from the original site and vital for Aer Arann

• RouteMap Quick View so you can quickly see where Aer Arann fly to without leaving the homepage
  (this may not be live on the current site as we explore some new banner sizes)
• A ‘Why Fly Aer Arann’ panel to highlight Aer Arann’s unique selling points and their fantastic customer service
• Reduction overall of ‘noise’ and a layout based on a cleaner grid system
• Larger ‘featured routes’ banner to highlight sales, new destinations and similar Aer Arann offers

In total, we explored about 6 concepts, whittled them down to three of the strongest and then settled on our favourite which was then designed and developed further in May 2008.

We also redesigned the Aer Arann booking engine and imporved the user interface with a new simple 3 step online booking process (reduced from 6 steps). More on both of these later but in the meantime, best of luck to Aer Arann and  all the shortlisted companies in a very competitive category and industry.

If you work in a shared office I’m sure at some stage you’ve come to a website where the music or narration started playing automatically and never gave you a choice?

If HP have put this level of thought into my online experience then I’m interested
in exploring their actual physical MediaSmart Server. Poor usability and design is the bain of my tech life so here’s a few free links for making such a thoughtful gesture.

HP MediaSmart Server
Use it to back up your files, remotely access your PC, share and stream digital media

1. Do a search for the item and choose 6 sites from the hundreds available. All 6 are from the first search results page.
2. I have a quick browse through each site and choose the 3 sites that are actually usable, well designed, have relevant information and appear trustworthy.
   Side note: I don’t consciously ‘choose’ these – the sites are just effortless to use and a natural choice.
3. I drop a site because they don’t have my item in stock.
4. I drop another site because because the ‘view larger image’ opens a pop-up window that is the same size as the thumbnail (how annoying is that!)
5. I do an ‘add to basket’ on the final site and fill out my details.
6. The ‘Add your details’ is insisting on some information I just can’t give (details below) and because it’s a ‘mandatory field’ the cart is refusing my order.
7. I leave the site and give up.

In fact, I’d say about 25% of all my online purchases fail because the form fields on eCommerce sites are badly configured, broken or have shopping cart systems thats just plain confusing. And I work in the field as a Web Designer so I’m comfortable with eCommerce and having to ‘work around’ usability flaws.

And it’s not just “Sheila’s flower shop” or your local DVD store with the tiny web presence and some technically brilliant but unusable e-Cart software that is losing them customers at the last step of a purchase. Larger companies that spend massive amounts of money on R&D, Compliance, Strategy and User Experience can get it wrong too and here’s a nice example of that in action.

I’ve seen a product that I want to buy and the site is integrated with Google’s new Checkout shopping cart.

I add my details to the payment form. Name, email, phone and country are all fine.

The postal code field (high lighted above in red) is mandatory and insists that I add it here. My address (and most addresses in Ireland outside of Dublin city) doesn’t have a postal code so I usually add ‘NA’ or ‘NONE’ when shopping online to circumvent this. That won’t work here because not only is the postal code required but the web site thinks that a postal code is a certain amount of letters or numbers long and is trying to shoe horn my details through their mandatory fields.

Thinking that the tiny question mark icon beside the Postal Code field will tell me how to get round this issue and allow me to order my product, I click on it. This opens a new window at the An Post web site.

It looks promising and someone is thinking in the right direction but this site just helps me locate my local post office. It doesn’t help me find my postcode and even if I had one, it doesn’t help me find it. I eventually go back to the check out page and try a few more hacks and give up. I was only shopping for a Letterbox but now I think I’ll just drive into town and buy one in a real shop.

So in closing, I understand that certain fields are consistent and can be made mandatory across most sites on the web.
For example

• All credit cards are 16 digits long and have an expiry date
• All credit cards have a 6 digit Card Verification Value on the back
• All credit cards have a name or company name and associated address

but other details which we take for granted or assume are global often just don’t translate to a one-size-fits-all format. Worse still, some details are driven by user preferences. IE an email address may not match my company domain name because I don’t want to be spammed at work.

So, when it comes to mandatory form field Vs user preference or regional fromatting, the retailer will loose but the consumer won’t win either. The biggest wastage for both in the example above is that it took me hours of searching for this product and dismissing several other sites to get to that particular website. With the average website losing 9 out of every 10 customers, its a real pity that the final site fell at the last hurdle.

Incidentally, doing a quick Google on the whole mandatory fields issue has brought me to this post from Tom Raftery who is having similar postcode trouble with Yahoo.

From dilbert.com

I’ve been meaning to post about the iQ 2006 Boot Camp for a while and since we’ve been invited to speak in the GURU slot, now seems like as good a time as ever.

If you haven’t yet registered, you can hear the guys present, educate, inform and charm over 9 x 1/2 day workshops from October 17th to 19th in Dublin’s Morrison Hotel.
This year’s Boot Camp is focused on helping you to understand your customers better so that you can drive action and deliver measurably better online results.
Workshops include

• Better usability and interactivity with Ajax
• Get into the minds of your users: Profiling your audience with personas
• Accessibility 2.0: How the new guidelines affect you and your website
• Writing for the web: The essential techniques
• Getting more from your intranet
• Web analytics: Learn how to measure your website’s success (or failure)
• Rapid-fire user-testing
• Write to sell and persuade online
• Drive more traffic to your website

Register on the iQ Content site.

Visit www.edenweb.ie and click on the Portfolio link on the top right of the page. Believe it or not, in the last 5/6 years we’ve never had our own design work on our site.

Anyway, please take a look and I’d love to hear your feedback.

P

There is an emphasis on RSS feeds, tabbed browsing, improved print handling, search and of course, security, for end users while web designers and developers should notice improved handling and implementation of web standards.

First impressions just from the screenshots are (and this is purely aesthetic) that the new GUI (Graphical User Interface) is a little busy. But this is only a BETA.

There’s some nice design work going on over on the site too. Microsoft seem to have upped the stakes for their web design department. Nice work.
Great IE 7 blog too. Wonder who does their PR :O)