Originally Posted by
thewinchester
Have signed to to take a look at it tonight, and it does look very promising.
Plain jane look aside (and looks don't matter too much anyway), it's very functional, simple and easy to understand control interfaces, and clean results screen. Also, huge props for clean, semantic and accessible coding techniques - I know the odd blind flyer who is seeking out awards would love you for this.
I also like how previous searches can be easily retrieved, and the table layout is quite reasonable. I would suggest you look at changing the style for your A tags in the table heading on the list page so you don't have blue links atop gray text. THEAD & TBODY tags here for accessibility would also be a plus.
Some initial suggestions for your consideration:
- Switch the Javascript alert dialogue used for bringing up the routing/timing information for something a little less abrupt: Suggest using a lightbox or similar, as users would be more likely to understand they can copy/paste text from there and can degrade gracefully. The lightbox could also be designed to go back and forward to details on the next possible
option for that day.
- Split feedback/help, move tips into the help page: This explains itself, your tips page is essentially help for using the service - yet when people access the help page, this information isn't there.
I've left this next one out of my main list, as it might be a bridge too far - but is it possible or already part of your development plan to be able to see how many points each possible routing would cost with the respective program?
This would require some additional knowledge, such as what programs the person is a member of or which one they intend to use. Doing so if anything would remove one additional user step, by allowing them to define in a profile preferred alliances/carriers on the search/build screen for them without having to select these each time.
Other than that, a brilliant effort - well done. Look forward to seeing how this evolves in the future.
thewinchester, thanks for the notes on sign up - it is an honor to have you stop by.
Your observations are right to the point and ANX has been updated to address many of them. Some of them are just vestiges from a previous version, such as the inelegant flight info alert box, strange absence of tips on the help page, or the poor table header background color.
There are some major enhancements to the viewer coming up, so I am holding on the rest of your suggestions, but the eventual changes should address them.
There are too many components involved to make programming a pricing engine feasible. However, part of the future plans is to have more interactive reference, so perhaps I could include links to award charts that can be consulted quickly.
Originally Posted by
btravel112
great first effort, just running some cursory searches (simple ones) and i'm liking it already. I like how you've incorporated more complex routing mechanisms as well.
Thanks for trying it out,
btravel112. I hope you find it useful.