intuition

I am interested, will need some advance notice to be able to commit.



I second this. Not as crazy as it might sound at first. For instance, it could be offered inside the affiliate-program Finnair runs.

intuition

Instinctively, I would agree with ffay005. This is a question about affordance; Things should look what they do, they should not employ visual trick and hide their actions.
(In recent times fashion seems to have won over the ancient design rules. Many just copy crappy ios design and automatically gets bad design with hidden interface elements and convoluted actions)

But digesting this I realise that the question really is about is implementing a design and process that also takes the complicated travel agent knowledge Gnopps talks about, and turns it into something normal users can use without having that special knowledge. A good design would have taken into account all special circumstances, provided visual guides and processes to help users take advantage of the inherent knowledge in the dataset.

Now it is just like "Hey, here are all the results from the booking engine. Let's iterate through them and render them one by on a html page with gigantic buttons that are easily clickable from a handheld device, and we are done here".

ffay005

For clarity, would it be sensible to add a new list to the Wiki for those interested in taking part in the booking engine meeting? (However, the participant list of the 18APR meeting should IMO not be removed.)

Would this meeting include other online features as well, such as choosing seats and meals / manage my booking or would it be solely about making new reservations?

Purjelentaja

How about making this a separate thread as this issue perhaps is not of interest to everyone, but in a separate thread those interested could take the issues, findings and improvement suggestions deeper already before that meeting, so that AY guys could prepare to the meeting better?

lauriii

I work on UI / UX design myself. For that reason I'm not sure how helpful my involvement would be. Anyway if there is some value in attending I would be interested to join.

nordic

I would like to see a booking engine which would allow one to choose the booking class. I have sometimes not found e.g. a discounted business class ticket to the US because not all routes have been shown. Then I have checked the availability on different segments on expertflyer and after having put my choice of flights in multi-city search on ba.com I have completed my transaction. As added bonus I have been able to choose a Finnair code-share flight and choose flights which allow some time in the lounge at LHR. However, this is way too complicated and it would be nice to do that on finnair.com.

Choosing the booking class would also help to maximize miles & points. Just showing 100 % AY+ points is not useful, if you use another FF programme.

I know that a majority of passengers prefer a simple booking engine, but some of us want more choices without calling a TA. It is way too embarrassing to request a complicated group just for miles. This could help AY to increase revenue.

Jainzar

I am interessted but since I often have a big screen I heavily dislike the new UI to put it into nicer words. Nevertheless if somebody wants to have constructive feedback, you are welcome.

cistavoda

Nothing is embarrassing when you are a paying customer as long as you remain considerate and polite!

Aviating

I noted that in the new on-line ticket shop the amount of earned points are not shown anymore in % as it used to before.

Now it just says: Finnair Plus -pisteet Kyllä.

To find out how many points will be accrued you need to go to the next step and select the flight to find out the booking class. Then you need to go to the table on the Finnair Plus pages to look up the points. This for an Atlantic flight.

Courmisch

The points are still shown if you click on the drop-down menu for the ticket types.

For joint venture flights and interline tickets, the earnings have been ever been shown - since they may vary for each segment.

intuition

They have removed sooo many things and details from the previous version. One must admire them for being able to keep on making the site worse every time. For instance:

If you do a +-3 day search, you can't go back to the result matrix to chose another day. You can only go back to beginning and then you need to reenter everything again.

There also used to be a handy date-selector in the flight selector tab, it is also gone. There is infact no way to update a search with new dates, you need to go back to page one and re-enter everything again.

Flight details have been hidden for no good reason. Some flight details (like who is operating the flight) needs 2 clicks to be found, since the "click here for details" only reveals a little data.

Class of service have been hidden altogether. Before, if you knew where to look you could see if a segment was in economy, now you can't. It is only shown once you have selected flights and are about to pay. Only way to go back and select a flight in business? Yes sir, go to page one and re-enter all search parameters once again!

You cannot see both outbound and home bound in one screen. You always need to scroll.

The page is not localized anymore. All numbers are presented in american number format in a really difficult to read font. Durations are presented i H and min, where it was previously localised.

Text are now flowing without any structure, where it previously where fixed into columns, making it extremely difficult to find relevant data.

Large colour markers saying "Only 9 seats left!!" distract and steal focus from important information. The text "1 transfer" is higlighted while the total flight time is not.

intuition

Great usage of screen estate. The flight selection buttons are, in their smallest version, adapted for a 1280 wide screen. If you are on lower resolution, they won't be visible on screen! You will need to scroll sideways too!

Aviating

And the button to get to the next page is almost hidden as well.

theBro

I would like to have transfer time written out for me on the flight choosing page. Looking for one number instead of trying to spot the arrival-departure pair and count myself is not really suitable for quickly choosing the best flights. And probably the worst part when optimizing points is the fact that only Finnair logo is shown when there is another flight that doesn't earn any points. As others have pointed out, the price options take up most of the screen, even though the flight details are the most relevant piece of information I am interested at this point.

I have also been looking for the button to the next page, but once getting familiar with the bottom bar, I find it actually an improvement to have the combined price visible at all times. However, the current implementation with header and footer eating up a lot of precious vertical space enforces one to scroll way too much.

BTW how short is the session timeout? I just got a nagging screen that session is about to expire when I had been clicking the flight details open and closed quite recently?

Jainzar

More or less the reasons why I dislike any planning nowadays on their page. Better to use a meta machine which does the job for AY especially when I'm forwarded in the end directly to AY.