BoardingArea Re-design
 

What was BoardingArea thinking with the latest re-design? On my (higher than average resolution) monitor the logos are huge and and take up most of the viewable screen. I can't imagine what this clusterf would look like on a lower resolution monitor.

Wow...horrible, why would anyone want to look more like F2B?!?!

Its the new tablet enabled web... so you can pick things with your finger, hence the size. On my surface I only see two big tiles at first, when scrolling down I see more. AFAIK the top line placement used to be reserved for a few and occasionally handed to the second tier on a rotation. In the new concept that is probably changing. The 3rd and 4th tier blogs will probably never make it to the top of BA, hence the P2B concept?

Eeek. I have posted before on here that I admired the BA home page as a model of clarity and style. I am not convinced by the new look. That said, I accept that the growth of the blog roll would necessitate some change.

I quite like the Category feature at the top right allowing you to easily find European Blogs, Hotel Blogs, etc.

Whoa just saw it (checked in response to this thread). Looks horrible - though not surprised since OMAT's new design that he put up last week was horrible too. Their (both BA and OMAT's) old homepage did look dated but I can't say this new one is an improvement in any way.

That is less useful than you think, since (for eg) a lotmof US blogs do good Avios content.

Being able to filter by airline or hotel .... that would be cool. And easy - all bloggers agree to a standard set of tags and you can then create a BA profile which only shows posts which match those tags.

I agree it is somewhat limited and your suggestion of a standard set of tags would make it a far more user friendly experience and more useful.

Wow. It is awful, just awful. I haven't been there in ages as I only go to a few sites and go to them directly, bypassing BA. The bloggers who are in the B level will never get a chance.

It's pretty unusable on my iPhone. Not that I ever to to that landing page anyway.

They should have ability to easily find/sort the blogs by:

Categories are better and easier than tags from a technical perspective and that is used in some of the filters but not all. And the current set is far from exhaustive. More things like that are already in the works and coming soon(ish).

I, too, dislike the massive icons "above the fold" and think there are some changes which could improve readability of the site. On the plus side, however, there are more stories on the front page now which I think is good and I believe the content on the front page is easier to read than before.
I'm not sure it is all that much worse than before in this context, sadly.

The new BA has a front page!?

All I can see is a piece of a logo of one of the featured blogs.

If the redesign is meant to accommodate mobile devices it's a massive fail on my iPhone.

VFTW is soliciting input on a potential redesign. I'd link but I'm on my iPhone on Playa Blanca in Punta Cana, making it a pain. Anyway, my advice was: if it ain't broke don't fix it. I just don't understand the desire to change things when all it does is make them worse. FT looks basically exactly the same as it did in 1998 and it's still the premier source of points and miles info on the planet.

What iOS are you running? I just looked at it on a 4s running iOS 7 and it is decent enough. One story at a time and easy to scroll through in portrait mode; less good in landscape. If you look at is as more of a RSS reader app than a website it makes decent sense on that platform.

I only ever use the iPhone to read stuff in landscape. Maybe that's the issue.

As an IT Guy, I find the new site to be a massive fail. Previously you could scan all blogs and get enough details to know if you want to read the post or not. Now with the tiles they cut off most of the details, leaving you with sometimes just half a sentence.

I find myself going there less and less now, which might be a good thing since I found declining value in the content anyway.:td:

There are definitely issues with the way the excerpts are implemented right now. I'm frustrated with that as well. Supposedly getting better soon.

The 2 biggest issues for me are (1) the size of the images and (2) the lack of identifying image after the first 5 posts. The prior design was far more eloquent and readable with a small identifying image for each blog post. Now it is much harder now to weed out blogs visually. Not sure why they got rid of the identifying images since they made the initial image(s) huge. Can't have been to save space.

This was never supposed to be the final layout of that section and it is going to be fixed eventually.

I'm sure folks here will come up with other things to hate about the design when that happens, but it is going to change.

Maybe you don't know, but why not do user testing before implementation?

Why the rush to market before the design is complete? Was it about changing the URLs?

You're correct on this one. I do not know.

Seriously, how hard would it be to throw in a small thumbnail? I'm not a web developer but could crank out the fix in just a few minutes. Makes you wonder what clowns they hired to do this. It's a complete disaster.

:rolleyes:

Seriously?

I do have to say the logic in the related posts seems to be getting better. When this first rolled out, the logic behind the related posts section was flawed - it was linking to articles that maybe shared one word (say Hyatt) but were old, dated, and completely unrelated to the post you just read.

Yes, and for someone that has some tech/web prowess I'm surprised you disagree. Or did you have a hand in this, lol. I don't usually read DP but noticed he had a post yesterday asking people what they thought. Read the comments. Not much love.

http://deltapoints.boardingarea.com/...ints-homepage/

So many say this buy my numbers don't agree.

My readers don't seem to like the new BA theme so much. However, it seems the BA numbers also tell another story.

So, many say one thing but the clicks say another! @:-)

huh? correlation does not imply causation... i'd explain this in greater detail, but somehow i think i'd be wasting my breath.

i'll keep it short. i haven't heard much good about the redesign. ppl may still be clicking on BA despite how messed up it currently is. that does not mean they like the deisgn...

Hey DP, good on you for posing the question to your readers. Heck, even a blind man can hit a dartboard with enough attempts. But don't kid yourself, most of us here know who is full of BS.

Totally agree, the new design is awful. I can understand wanting to optimize for tablet viewing, but couldn't they have with gone with an app? I find myself bookmarking the blogs I want to read daily and skipping BA's front page completely.

Lets stay on topic. 5 OT posts about moderation and censorship removed.

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Regards Oliver2002
Mod EM&PR

The difference between bad/incomplete and a "complete disaster" is not hard to see. The site was launched incomplete. It has plenty of bugs, many which the discussion here hasn't even noted and probably never will notice but that we see from what little access we have to the back-end.

But the site is still online and clicks haven't fallen through the floor. It isn't where it should be but it is hardly a disaster. And the hyperbole doesn't help anyone.

I would think the user experience would be the primary metric. When you have people resorting to bookmarking blogs and bypassing the boardingarea front page, I'm not sure "hardly a disaster" is the most accurate depiction either.

Can we all just agree on 'sloppy and unprofessional?' ;)

Seriously though, user acceptance testing is a thing for a very good reason. This could be a case study.

The redesign is the reason I'm less likely to look at boardingarea.com. I found it was more readable last month than it is this week.

Well, instead of fixing what's broken (ridiculously large icons, icons but no preview, no icons for other posts) it seems the BA web design team has instead invested their efforts to add a pop up at the bottom of the screen to obscure even more real estate. You would think that once a user chooses to click on or close the pop up it would go away the next time they visit but nope, comes back every time you visit BA. EDIT: looks like they finally got around to disabling the pop up after 2 days.