kale73

I believe good design and user experience are essential to functionality.

Where I differ with the "Oh, that's so last Century!" and "Where is my Tulip?" complainers is that I believe the current setup does represent a relatively good design and user experience. Could it be better? Sure. Will a complete "21st Century" makeover make it better? Highly doubtful.

wanymayold

Ummmm... IMHO FT interface is much better than MP. MP is ugly.

Bold mine. IMHO, No, No, No... Amazon shopping is frustrating. It is less frustrating than the majority of other online retails, but still very frustrating.

Back to topic. While UA.com has many glitches and not super fast, it is still way much better than almost all other airlines.com. Heck, I even think UA.com looks better than the updated AA/DL.com
I often choose to book on UA.com just because I do not want to deal with the BS on many other airlines.com

dmurphynj

PDA.continental.com, how I miss thee.

That was everything you're talking about - all text, no graphics needed. LOVED it.

I'm a command line kind of guy - would rather use VMS 'phone' than Facebook messages, but the world's passed me by, I guess.

Edit: for a neat throwback, telnet to rainmaker.wunderground.com

davidviolin

Biggest issue I have with the website is how slow it is. Sometimes I have to wait almost a minute to return flight search results. Very time consuming if you need to do many searches. Otherwise I would say the site is (just) OK.

bob_the_d

please, please, please i hope they do not get rid of this. recently i've been dipping my toe at DL and once in a while AA, and i never really realized how much i've changed my habits around this feature. i time my lounge/food/work around exactly knowing when the inbound is coming, rather than constantly checking to see if my outbound has changed on the departures board every few minutes. when i suddenly found myself without that feature on another airline, it was definitely noticeable. i was traveling with coworkers who only fly DL last week, and the general consensus was, "oh crap that would be super useful if i had that."

joshwex90

Happy to see that I'm with the majority on this.

There are some small changes I would like to make to the website - I like from the PMUA site the information on baggage. Ever since baggage calc was implemented, the info mostly isn't there. I simply wish there was clearer information on charges without needing to input flight info.

I also like PMUA's approach with showing outbound and inbound side-by-side, though I seem to remember not everyone thinking it was so great.

I like the functionality of the site, and the graphics bother me much less as long as it works. VX has taken the opposite approach

Loved it!

Didn't load for me

UA-NYC

YMMV - I end up calling into UA far, far more than AA to deal with issues (given similar amounts of flying on both these days).

Yes, on AA it would be nice to be able to apply SWUs online and such, but UA w/SHARES issues requires often lengthy calls IME.

Boo_Radley

They end up this way because of the reality of limited IT budgets. At some point you need to decide where the marginal dollars go. Put another way: if IT budget is fixed, a pretty website comes at the expense of a functional website. That's where the whole "choose one" idea comes from.

tods27

I agree that the overall aesthetic of the UA website is painful, but I also like most of the feature/function bits. As others have noted, my biggest pet-peeve is the calendar function not moving out the return date options (it should always move the return date to the day after the outbound date whether you use the calendar widget or not). My second biggest complaint is that the search by schedule function doesn't respect the departure times that they let you specify (e.g. afternoon, morning, etc). It seems to simply show all flights for the day every time.

I liked the side-by-side feature from .bomb, but I have found that the new way isn't so bad.

Cargojon

I think the website it fine, one of my favorite among airline websites. I hope whatever cosmetic changes they would give it wouldn't bog it down in flash-heavy garbage and eliminate the functionality that I've come to count on over the years.

JBord

I agree that I can live with it, especially for domestic flights. For intl flights, I try to be flexible and book where there is R availability whenever possible.

Unless there's a trick I'm missing, it's a pretty big time waster to have to click through to the return flight, or to search all one ways. It would be nice to see R availability round trip on one screen.

If returning to the UA.com method meant giving up something else, I'd vote to keep it as is.

PV_Premier

i prefer more rudimentary websites such as .bomb and alaskaair to the "fancier" websites like DL and AA...function over form, please!

Xyzzy

Well, I have to say that I absolutely despised that 'feature' f the old UA site. I very much prefer being able to pick and choose each and every flight individually rather than having the site pick combinations for me.

dinoscool3

This. I had a few problems with the PMUA flight selection, and was happy they went with the CO site.

milesmuncher

^

Completely agree RE: the US site. When my wife changed her name, it was quite a hassle to submit (often by fax!) documentation to get her name changed with all her programs. EXCEPT on US, where we simply logged into her account and just changed it in her profile. No substantiation necessary at all. At the time, I appreciated the ease, but I soon realized that that's a pretty glaring security flaw.


As for the PMUA setup that showed both sides of a trip on the same page for
pricing purposes - I get the appeal on some level, but practically it doesn't make a whole lot of difference to me. When I click through the return segment after selecting the outbound flight, only to find that it's only the 6am option that is available at the lowest price quote on the previous page I'm certainly annoyed, but it's not like booking a different outbound would change that.