Not ideal....
 

I'm in IT so I can understand the difficulty and demands of the project. I'll however, give you honest feedback as I believe that is what you want.

1. Performance - Still slow for me. Both in IE7 and Firefox 3.0.11. Why does it take 15+ seconds to open my skymiles summary page from the homepage link. It waits for smetrics.delta.com frequently. Maybe a DB pull issue

2- Appearance - Maybe it's just not my style, but I think the design took a change for the worse. Things look boxy and crammed in some places and in some places unnecessarily large. The Account Summary page looks inconsistent with the Skymiles number / member info now next to the Total Program Summary Table. I'm actually surprised at the change, it looks like a big step back and not at all pleasing to the eye. Just my thoughts though. Do you all ever do focus groups for feature / content / layout thoughts?

Thanks for a forum asking for our honest feedback...

It does seem to be more responsive. I'm assuming 1024 means that they are now targeting 1024x768 as the target monitor resolution of the customers.

Overall it looks like a slightly less styled version of the old site that seems more responsive. My one grievance is with the AccountHist page (the table of the past 12 months of skymiles activity)

The table has been stretched out so that it is 1024 pixels wide. From a cognitive/data-processing standpoint it's much more difficult for me to quickly scan this list and mentally map the words on the left to the numbers on the right. I have to move my eyes from left to right.

Would it be possible to make this table resizable based on browser width? I know...everybody wants to be an armchair quarterback :)

Still takes time for the page to load. I think Delta should look at making the site like NWA.com as that site is easier to use and more organized. Delta.com just seems like things are all over the place and you have to scroll and search for things.

Safari 4 and Leopard?
 

On Safari 4 and Mac OS X, Delta's new web site looks absolutely terrible.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3202/...8cab5cdd_o.png

The preferred trips pop up menu appears right over the search options, there seems to be an awful amount of padding, and the flight status controls don't line up as before.

On XP, page loads very quickly with Flash blocked. There never seems to be any incentive to unblock Flash for this site since the displays are useless and the load time is slowed.

Itineraries summary link comes up instantly when asked for but it still takes a while for the itineraries page to show. My account page loaded very quickly. Overall there has definitely been an improvement.

please do not take this the wrong way as i'm not looking for a flame war, personal attack, etc etc. in fact i started this thread to ensure i kept everyone here informed of the changes as they are happening and anything we find that we need to correct (i'll probably ask to have it merged ito the bug reporting thread later). i figured i'd try to continue the open, honest and direct approach with everyone since that has been the desire.

so, with that being said, can i see a raise of hands for people that ACTUALLY know what our infrastructure is for firewalls, load balances, servers (type, etc), the configuration, locations, and the number of each of these we have? as i have said time and time again, this whole hypothesizing about things you have no knowledge about generates nothing but FUD which generates conversations "badmouthing" delta IT for over nothing but hypothesis. i'm not going to share the information as that's confidential.

the site is NOT set to open without flash, but having just pulled up the home page in ie8 in the flash and non-flash versions i'm not seeing any issues. you have the following links that will bypass flash:
http://www.delta.com/?noFlash
http://www.delta.com/?fpe (supports previous method)

i can assure you i will get another email "yelling" at me for providing this information, but that's what people want, and i refuse to deny them that ability if it is there.

milesandpoints : as for the performance, yes i did a MASSIVE amount of this again on this project ranging from removing unnecessary images, optimizing the remaining images, gutting huge blocks of code to run more efficiently, etc etc. our tests right now are showing a pretty decent reduction load time on at least the home page. the smetrics.delta.com is something we are aware of that has issues and have multiple people working to get that request to be faster. otherwise, we've dropped a LOT of requests with this project. we did have to add an additional stylesheet for ie6 and one for ie7 (microsoft has even resorted to this approach).

as for the appearance, every time any site with as many users as either delta.com or nwa.com there is usually a decent backlash due to the fact that its a change. the style for delta is a little more boxy (and that was the desire to convert the site to when we emerged from bankruptcy actually). the changes to account history and monthly statements where the top two boxes were previously one over the other and are now side by side was done because when they were stacked the page really didn't feel right. previously it was too narrow to put them side by side. now we have enough room so that's why the change was made. as for the table stretching from left to right (should render out at 950px wide or 960px). i tried specifying letting the browser handle how wide this should be, but that was resulting in other displays far less desirable. in addition, while many here probably use the site in english, we have to make sure things display properly in multiple languages. that is probably the one thing many (even internally) often overlook.

with change comes the need to adapt. just remember everyone has complained that delta.com is "too cramped" and nwa.com is more open. well with this, we did open it up so that its got more white space and openness. some will like it, some want. you just can't please everyone all the the time.

aramk : safari 4 isn't listed as a supported browser yet as it was just recently released (June 8th specifically).

monitor : the delay you see with the itineraries is because rather than waiting for the itineraries to comeback and then render the page, we've moved to using ajax. so the page renders out while in the background it is retrieving your itinerary/itineraries.

i'm glad some are noticing the overall improvements in speed.

The design changes kicked in as I was booking a ticket. I had thought a CSS file was broken somewhere. But, no problems on Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4, both on Mac. The new design looks fine to me, though I'm sure there will be tweaks as art assets are migrated.

Now please fix the mobile site account history display :) It does not screen scrape delta.com properly, for my account at least.

DLNW is the largest airline by volume, and airfare search is computationally expensive, so it would be interesting to hear about their server setup.

I'm on Vista and IE8. Flash off gave some ghastly presentations on the home page. Flash on, there were some small positioning errors, but nothing to prevent use. I tried:

Itineraries: fine
Paid booking: fine
Account history: fine
award booking: well, the 1024 project didn't magically fix the award search engine...

It seems pretty zippy and free of artifacts in the (limited) use.

nwa.com has few presentation benefits but NWA flyers know it. I don't see it as a visual/data organizing benchmark at all even when I recognize a more reliable award search engine.

The http://www.delta.com/?noFlash link redirects recursively for me (Firefox 3.5 Mac, logged in to my SkyMiles account in another tab).

I strongly prefer the no-Flash version. Please continue to make it available! Also, I hope that at some point the javascript:formatURL() links on the front page will go away, because those do not work with Firefox's "open in new tab".

Always glad to see improvements in site functionality and speed. Makes it easier for me to book tickets!

One thing I notice is the pull down menus across the top that open up when scrolled across open up significantly faster (I'm on Firefox). Thanks! The site does seem to be a little speedier overall.

Definitely quicker loading, which is much appreciated (funny how 5 or 10 seconds seems an eternity). Appears to be a cleaner look, too, and I had no alignment or graphic issues. I like it just fine, thank you.

If that is directed at me for some of my comments, I apologize as it wasn't meant as a flame, but more commentary. I realize you all are under a lot of pressure with a rollout like that. If you took my comments as an attack, let me apologize for that now.

res1968 see here: http://blog.delta.com/2009/05/29/sne...te-is-growing/

It keeps the site at 1024x768 pixels (screen resolution) so you don't have to scroll up & down if you have your display set at that resolution (right click on desktop, properties). If you have your resolution set at that level or higher, the entire website appears on one page.

looks like that's working now. while in triple checking i went ahead and updated the check to also exclude android and blackberry devices. i'm testing that update now, but we're experiencing some issues so i'm going to leave it until tomorrow to update.

the javascript:formatURL(); aspect i'm going to have to look what can be done about it. its in there because the url is encoded in the xml file. i can probably add in a url decode into the process, but that's going to take some testing.

seminole_kev : my statements in regards to the delta.com infrastructure were directed at your comments, but a simple scanning of the forums will show you numerous types of comments that are all based on hypothesis. in the case of your's, they are all incorrect. if there's one thing i'd like to see stop happening here (which i know i have no control over) are these discussions types of discussions.

i can't share the information regarding how our servers are set up as every thing i have on them says confidential. sorry about that. you'll just have to accept the fact that what i am saying is the truth.

I love the changes!