ffay005

This seems to work now. Picked seats for two non-status AY+ members on award tickets in X class. Have tried several times before, but it has always failed. This time, both seats went through.

oliver2002

AY needs to look into their dynamic seating settings at Amadeus Altéa...

An example of such settings at work:

intuition

What seems to have happened (purely guessing, I have absolutely no insight) is that the "theoretical" seat map has been "firmly allocated" (as the video calls it), at a very early stage.

Because this is exactly how the seat maps looked if you tried to do ASR - almost every seat already reserved even on flights several months out.

Also, every attempt to change seat failed, so the "background re-allocation of passengers already assigned to the preferred seat" did not work at all.

oliver2002

Altea assigns a pcv to each passenger, and based on that a number of things happen, one of them being the ability to choose from a wide range of seats during ASR or checkin. This explains why ffay005 would see or be able to ASR award tickets in X previously or why Aurinkomatkat bookings don't qualify for ASR.


http://www.amadeus.com/web/amadeus/e...=1400000000211

intuition

But what would be the explanation to Finnair customers being presented with a 100% full seatmap at check-in T-36 or at status based ASR 7 months ahead of flight?

oliver2002

'Your ticket wasn't recognised to be of any value to AY, hence you get what ever seat we will have left'

Seriously though AY has left out some coding...

riku2

The clip is quite fascinating. thanks for sharing.

I do hope the clip doesn't reflect how the "best possible seats" are allocated to different passengers in reality though.
At 1:18 they explain how the single travellers are allocated 'the best possible seats' (yellow) but some of those unfortunates are middle seats with two passengers either side already. "the best possible seats" would surely include some of the empty aisle and window seats, and particularly allocate an empty block of three to two single passengers each end with an empty seat in the middle. Seems to make no sense to leave empty aisle seats at the back and put single pax in middle seats.

ffay005

I received an online questionnaire about the webpage. The email said, "You were one of the participants interested in being part of creating the new finnair.com web experience. We are currently designing the new website for Finnair and want to incorporate our global users in the development of an even better Finnair experience."

However, the questionnaire wasn't really about the webpage and booking engine, as I had hoped. Basically the only question was a bunch of activities to be placed under main headings (ie where do I feel Print my Boarding Pass goes; "Before my flight" or "Check in" or "Travelling" etc) and then suggesting better names for the headings. Pretty useless.

skba1

I have also received said email, although not yet had time to look at the questionnaire.

However most of what we wanted to discuss are various bugs and technical shortcomings of functionality primarily of the booking engine, and some other aspects of functionality we as frequent travellers use.

Discussing where things go design wise comes extremely low on my competence and interest fields.

I will give the questionnaire a shot when I have time, but it feels to be missing the point.

FFlash

got same survey and doing it now. Already first page is doomed, but giving it another shot

FFlash

And there it was.
Was there some categories which were difficult to place? oh my...
Propose titles of categories...oh well...
Finally open words for making categories better...what... I only gave them advice to go back to the old booking engine and forget the namings of categories etc and focus on removing bugs of booking engine and make it allow complex bookings.

I at least tried...I hope they try too to serve us with a booking engine

intuition

I do agree with you all that other issues are much more important.
I didn't get the invite, so I'd just like to highlight this:

Current design paradigm is to hide stuff. It is the general trend in the current UX fashion industry, but nevertheless a terrible idea. Hiding stuff == difficult to find. So if they are dealing with the design problem "people can't find our content" then we surely have a lot of feedback to offer.

Say you want to look up earnings for a CX flight. Since they removed all menu structure, there is no way to access that directly. You have to click into the right top-subject (Finnair plus) and from there scroll and scroll and scroll until you find a link and from that page scroll and scroll and scroll. Rinse / repeat.

Even though I am very familiar with the structure of the site, I find myself lost most of the time. Currently, the best way to get to a page with information you know is there is to use the search. And god knows that one isn't fit for purpose.

If someone feels the same, please make sure you add feedback about the lack of navigational support. Structuring is pointless if there is no way to access the structure.

intuition

Jakob Nielsen's heuristics, anyone?


(That would be my feedback form)

lauriii

I didn't get an invitation but at least I can comment on these things here. This is probably one of my favourite topics so here we go!

One good example of an airline website navigation is Qantas. They have actually pretty well-built menu structure and well built mega menu (the big boxes popping on the screen after you hover the main level menu item).

Usually these days when possible, anyone designing navigation interface for a site would try to avoid mega menus since they are quite difficult to get right. Mostly because of the insane amount of devices that has to be supported and in general a lot of people don't know how to use them. Also, I don't know why but this design trend is quite popular in Finland.

Having an interface like this allows them to do storytelling. By removing the shortcuts they will ensure that users will always follow a certain path and therefore they will be shown certain info. This is often what the marketing team likes especially (often also very powerful on these decisions).

They've also tried to help people by trying out some anticipatory design practices but I think they could have succeeded better on that. They have used too few user personas and the site seems mostly relevant for a very basic level users.

They also mentioned that they are doing actual usability testing on users but I doubt that they would have used any hardcore users to test the site. I guess in their context the extremes would have a huge variety.

In overall I think they are doing a decent job on the UX on the Finnair.com, but try to go look at any of their sub websites. There you can see that clearly no thought has been given for the UX.

Anyway, a little bit of OT, there's also good examples of websites that have implemented similar website navigation with little bit more success. One of them is Valio. Apologies for any noon Finns. And no, I don't work for them

heatsink

Aurinkomatkat replied to me a few weeks ago. They said they'll look into how seat selection will work in the future, but in this case most seats had indeed already been taken at the 185 day mark.

I understand they can't do anything about it, but this situation is still annoying.