Fig 1: bestflights.com.au
The sites aims are to provide an way clients can do all there searching and booking of travel online, without the need of going into a branch office. This provides the public 24 hour 7 day a week access worldwide. The intended audience of the website is for individuals and organisations looking for travel booking and information. The site itself links to a number of different portals for different types of travel (i.e. bestcruises.com.au, bestadventures.com.au etc) these are all part of the same company but just serve different travel purposes. For this particular part of the assignment i will be focusing on only the flight information portal which is bestflights.com.au.
Fig 2: bestcruises.com.au, bestadventures.com.au which are just some of the other web sites which are part of the same travel group
Functionality that you can find on BestFlights include:
- Flight Search - detailed search facilities are provided which interrogates all major airlines of the world for flight information, so that users can easily search for the best fare on a given day
- Current Flight Sale Information - detailed ads of the current flight sale fares which the airlines are offering.
- Booking and Payment - booking and payment facilities are provided as part of the straight-through processing of airline bookings for customers. All the major payment methods are provided
- Other booking and information services are provided which include hotels, rail, insurance, adventures, and travel tools.
Criteria 1 - Navigation
The navigation of bestflights.com.au is broken into a 2 layer navigation menu at the top of the page, with subsection links. All the links are worded links with no visual image representation links. A sitemap is provided for navigational purposes, which helps clients to look at the site from a top down approach so that they can easily find information.
Positive Aspect
- Navigation is pretty simple and straightforward with it only being 2 levels deep, which helps people to not get lost in the site.
- Navigation bar is consistent looking as you go through the various other tabs, with no huge variations on the menu
- A breadcrumb idicator is left on the submenu so clients can tell which web section they are on in the site.
- Worded links so no misunderstanding can occur vs images representing certain links
Negative Aspect
- Need to do 2 clicks to get to the subsection you want to view
- Some of the tab links popup another window to another site, this makes the navigation complicated as the user will have 2 different sites open.
Suggestions for Improvement
- To introduce javascript menus so that users can easily hover over each tab and see the appropriate subsection headings without have to click on each tab to see the sections.
- Remove the
Criteria 2 - Colour Scheme
The colour scheme utilised in the BestFlights.com.au website is a mixture of many colours however the main predominant ones are red for the buttons, menus and headings, light blue is the main background color, and yellowish orange is the main header background color.
Positive Aspect
- Makes the website vibrant and energetic, which is what people are like when booking holidays.
- All the colours used contrast with each other which makes readability much easier as words, content and background cannot be mixed up
- No dull colours such as grey/darkish colours are used, which helps make the site exciting to users
Negative Aspect
- Due to the use of red in the main menu, and on buttons, people who are red/green colour deficit wont be able to differentiate easily the menu top and bottom layer sections easily. Example of the vischeck on bestflights.com.au is below
Suggestions for Improvement
- The use of another colour instead of red which isn't impacted as much for the visually impaired
Criteria 3 - Layout
First of all the layout is very clean and structured, with all the products and services at the top of the page, and then the main content below that for each of the pages, and the associated footer at the bottom of all the pages. The pages themselves can contain one or more areas for a particular section (i.e. as per the home page consists of a flight search section on the left of the page, and a main content section with current deals in the market place for flights.
The layout is a fixed width layout, which can leave an empty section to the left and right of the main content section, which is variable based on the screen size viewing the page.
Positive Aspect
- This particular website layout follows the ice design principals of web pages whereby there is a fixed width, and the webmaster / designer has more control over the look and feel of the page.
- The look and feel is quite clean, with no huge amounts of scrolling so most of the information fits in the designed space
- Logo appears in the right section for everypage (i.e. in the top lefthand corner)
Negative Aspect
- On larger screen sizes there can be alot of unused real estate
- The seems to be an unusual amount of tabs on the page which makes the navigation quite long
Suggestions for Improvement
Look at implementing a mobile browser friendly version of the site. Because the mobile market is increasing rapidly, and this channel will provide another way to sell services to customers.
Other comments/suggestions for BestFlights.com.au
- Rotating promotional images, instead of the static ones which only change when the page is refreshed.
- Make the site region/user specific so that people can customise what they want to see being promoted to them
- Implementation of a search functionality for the site, currently the only search are to do with flights, hotels, cars etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment