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Old Jan 15, 2019, 8:33 pm
  #1  
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Question What are the worst travel websites to use?

Hi all, I'm a university student working on a project for a prototyping class. Our assignment is to find a travel-related website, identify 7 pain points, and redesign it to be more usable. As someone who doesn't travel much, I'm coming here to get first-hand accounts that will hopefully point me in the right direction. What are the worst websites you've used in terms of user experience?

Thanks!
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Old Jan 16, 2019, 3:25 am
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Originally Posted by kiwiki
Hi all, I'm a university student working on a project for a prototyping class. Our assignment is to find a travel-related website, identify 7 pain points, and redesign it to be more usable. As someone who doesn't travel much, I'm coming here to get first-hand accounts that will hopefully point me in the right direction. What are the worst websites you've used in terms of user experience?

Thanks!
What is the name and location of your school/college/university and what is your degree program? What exactly is the course for which you are requesting help? Has your project obtained human subject approvals?
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Old Jan 16, 2019, 11:33 am
  #3  
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Originally Posted by MSPeconomist
What is the name and location of your school/college/university and what is your degree program? What exactly is the course for which you are requesting help? Has your project obtained human subject approvals?
Why in the world would he need human subject approval? This is about designing a user interface, not about testing anything on humans. Since he's lacking in experience with travel websites he's asking to be pointed to bad examples.

Are you fixating on "pain points"? He's talking about things in the website that you hate, not about physical pain.
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Old Jan 16, 2019, 1:48 pm
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Here are my top 5 UX gripes with travel websites:
  1. Too many ads
  2. Tries to sell me travel packages (ads) instead of just the flight, or hotel, or car rental I'm researching
  3. Spies on me (uses my search to target ads to me later)
  4. Doesn't offer me the lowest prices but instead what providers have sponsored (i.e., ads)
  5. Also ads.

Any questions?
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Old Jan 16, 2019, 3:16 pm
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Originally Posted by MSPeconomist
What is the name and location of your school/college/university and what is your degree program? What exactly is the course for which you are requesting help? Has your project obtained human subject approvals?
You need all of this to recommended a poorly designed web site?

Are you trying to make FT a candidate?

Originally Posted by darthbimmer
Any questions?
Yes - do you have an answer to OP's question?


I remember when FT used to be helpful to newbies.
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Old Jan 16, 2019, 3:23 pm
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Originally Posted by kiwiki
What are the worst websites you've used in terms of user experience?
I think you can have a field day at http://paradisewithaview.com/

http://www.exmouth-view.co.uk/ could be a backup candidate.

More mainstream, https://www.ryanair.com/us/en/ is a colorful mess.

Too bad you're limited to travel sites - http://arngren.net/ is a UX Master's thesis in waiting.

Last edited by CPRich; Jan 16, 2019 at 3:32 pm
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Old Jan 16, 2019, 3:33 pm
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Originally Posted by Loren Pechtel
Why in the world would he need human subject approval? This is about designing a user interface, not about testing anything on humans. Since he's lacking in experience with travel websites he's asking to be pointed to bad examples.

Are you fixating on "pain points"? He's talking about things in the website that you hate, not about physical pain.
Perfectly reasonable. We need to have everything that is aimed at a human being approved by the Institutional Research Office. Everything.
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Old Jan 19, 2019, 3:13 pm
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Originally Posted by darthbimmer
Here are my top 5 UX gripes with travel websites:
  1. Too many ads
  2. Tries to sell me travel packages (ads) instead of just the flight, or hotel, or car rental I'm researching
  3. Spies on me (uses my search to target ads to me later)
  4. Doesn't offer me the lowest prices but instead what providers have sponsored (i.e., ads)
  5. Also ads.

Any questions?
Of course, from the perspective of the site operator, these are all FEATURES, not bugs! Good user experience is seldom their primary goal.
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Old Jan 19, 2019, 5:39 pm
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1 Slow (pictures too big in file size, too much Javascript going on)
1a Buggy
2 Too much nice graphics which tell you nothing of interest (see 1)
3 Designed to run on just one browser (or even one version of one browser) with no test on others (see 1a)

Craigslist is wonderful to use because it is none of the above: Minimal, lightweight, fast. Nothing flashy and looks like it was designed 20 years ago and not updated substantially.
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Old Jan 20, 2019, 8:26 pm
  #10  
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Originally Posted by milepig
Perfectly reasonable. We need to have everything that is aimed at a human being approved by the Institutional Research Office. Everything.
I don't see that he's aiming anything at humans. He's looking for examples of bad things. This is a classroom situation, he's not going to be actually making a travel website.
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Old Jan 20, 2019, 9:46 pm
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Institutional Review Board...

Originally Posted by Loren Pechtel
I don't see that he's aiming anything at humans. <snip>
That's not accurate:

Originally Posted by kiwiki
.. I'm coming here to get first-hand accounts that will hopefully point me in the right direction. What are the worst websites you've used in terms of user experience?
(underline mine)

IF OP's asking Siri, "what are the worst travel websites to use?", that would be another story.

Originally Posted by Loren Pechtel
... This is a classroom situation...
Research, including "classroom situation", that involves human subjects now has to obtain Institutional review board (IRB) approval.

In OP's case, s/he may be qualified for Exempt status or Expedited review. Still, the IRB review can't be exempt. Since OP's working on a college project, the professor/instructor should have given proper guidelines and/or advice for students to complete such class requirements.
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Old Jan 21, 2019, 4:15 am
  #12  
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Check the Online Travel Booking and Bidding Agencies forum. Many of the threads are just complaints about various sites, but I bet that some of those will have a bad interface/design as well.
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Old Jan 21, 2019, 4:54 am
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Originally Posted by kiwiki
Hi all, I'm a university student working on a project for a prototyping class. Our assignment is to find a travel-related website, identify 7 pain points, and redesign it to be more usable. As someone who doesn't travel much, I'm coming here to get first-hand accounts that will hopefully point me in the right direction. What are the worst websites you've used in terms of user experience?

Thanks!
1. Doesn’t allow same best price search capability in fare classes other then economy. For example skyscanner.com does not allow cheapest month searches in business or first class only economy.

2. Hotel booking websites don’t show suite only pricing. For example trivago.com will show you the lowest priced hotels in a certain class for given dates, but won’t allow you to filter by lowest price for a specific room type. Yes a certain fairmont property may have the lowest price in the 5 star category for a given date however if you move up to the lowest priced suite at that property this may no longer be the case. It’s often difficult to compare pricing for suites at multiple properties as you have to search each property individually for pricing adjusted for your preferred room type. There’s no website that allows you to search “cheapest one bedroom suite at all 5 star properties in a certain location for a given date set.”
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Old Jan 21, 2019, 5:14 am
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I feel sorry for the OP having to deal with the responses in this thread...
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Old Jan 21, 2019, 6:34 am
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Oh no, the inhumanity! OP is going to torture us with questions! Won't an ethics professor stop him already?

No wonder social "sciences" aren't taken seriously - OP has some actual work to do, like, designing a website, and no, you don't need anyone to approve gathering people's opinion on UX. Websites today do A/B testing all around so get outraged at that for a bit while OP is trying to do something useful with their life.
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