This is really nice, but they haven't solved the following problem: sometimes you need more information from further on in the process in order to choose your dates. For some types of trip, the most important thing is a combination of departure time and price; you want the lowest price as long as the departure/arrival is within your acceptable range, and then you want to work 'backwards' to pick dates based on that.
I don't know of any airline booking process that accommodates that use-case well.
The new VirginAmerica.com
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Re: The new VirginAmerica.com
#62This is super slick. Design wise it's ahead of its game, instead of another flat design website.
I love how they put "life" into their brand with those avatars and make it fun in this all too boring process of buying tickets. To be honest, I would be jealous of how innovative Virgin is lately when I'm another airline.
UX wise there are some things I would do differently. There are some rough edges but it's an iterative process and they'll probably track tons of things now. For example, changing prior steps will reset the date selection.
Deep respect for their team, I also love their new logo. Awesome!
Re: The new VirginAmerica.com
#63The new boarding pass design is fantastic. Every airline needs to do at least that part immediately.
There was a post a few years ago that detailed many of the archaic and somewhat obscure requirements that boarding passes must have: http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-p... It seems as though Virgin America can bypass many of these because there are no (?) international flights. The original boarding pass redesign post, to which the above was a rebuttal: http://passfail.squarespace.com/ Edit:…
There are 3 flights from mexican cities: Cancun, Los Cabos and Puerto Vallarta.
Re: The new VirginAmerica.com
#64Everything looks great, until the "Get Booking" link didn't work on the final slide (in Chrome on iPad)
Same here on a Nexus 5 with Chrome.
Oh the irony...
Re: The new VirginAmerica.com
#65The scrolljacking really makes for a terrible UI/UX. Designers: why is this something we're seeing more often? What is the main benefit?
I absolutely despise this trend. I don't know why it's so popular lately. This is the animated gif background and midi of our time.
Re: The new VirginAmerica.com
#66Text doesn't look right in the latest stable Chrome/Windows 7.
Re: The new VirginAmerica.com
#67This is really nice, but they haven't solved the following problem: sometimes you need more information from further on in the process in order to choose your dates. For some types of trip, the most important thing is a combination of departure time and price; you want the lowest price as long as the departure/arrival is within your acceptable range, and then you want to work 'backwards' to pick dates based on that.…
Hipmunk lets you search for flights with a certain date range and pick the best flights from that, and there's also a "pricegraph" that sounds like it does exactly what you want by showing you the cheapest prices within the next 90 days.
Re: The new VirginAmerica.com
#68This is super slick. Design wise it's ahead of its game, instead of another flat design website. I love how they put "life" into their brand with those avatars and make it fun in this all too boring process of buying tickets. To be honest, I would be jealous of how innovative Virgin is lately when I'm another airline. UX wise there are some things I would do differently. There are some rough edges but it's an iterati…
Well, I give them respect for trying something new. It has some improvements, but the UX falls short in others.
1. Boarding pass is great.
2. Being able to scroll back up to make changes is wonderful. A lot of airline sites are slow, your session breaks when you use the back button, etc. It's nice being able to scroll up, change a date, scroll back down. Well done.
As for the downside, it uses way too much space. This might work on a tablet or touch screen, but it's awful for the desktop. For example, your typical airline uses something like this...
http://i.imgur.com/bEjWWm0.png
A couple of autocomplete boxes, and a calendar picker that pops up. Works fine, it's all visible in a little box, and easy to use. The virgin site stretches this across a handful of pages, or if you're picking further off dates, it might be 10+ pages. That's just bad design.
What they should do is keep a more traditional method of selecting all your airports and dates, then scroll down to the prices when you click continue. I think it would be the best of both worlds.
They also need a method of finding the best price over a given time period. Jetstar is one of my favorites when it comes to this...
http://booknow.jetstar.com/Search.aspx
Pick a flight, say Brisbane to Sydney for a few weeks in June. Click the box to say you want the lowest price. It gives you a nice little graph with all the cheapest flights highlighted, so you can easily choose your days. Actually, the whole Jetstar booking process is decent, and I used it often in Australia.
Re: The new VirginAmerica.com
#69The scrolljacking really makes for a terrible UI/UX. Designers: why is this something we're seeing more often? What is the main benefit?
Well we're seeing it more often in UI/UX because "forced creative vision" aka "design dictatorship" is more popular and acceptable for designers these days. Especially new designers who don't want to stick to the tried and true rules of design (nor learn them), nor base their designs off of some kind of metrics or best practices statistics. Steve Jobs culminated this attitude through his "I'll tell the user what they…
Clients drive design 99.9% of the time.
Clients like it because they think the cool kids are doing it.
Clients also like gimmicky scroll effects and parallax.
Re: The new VirginAmerica.com
#70Sucks on iPad. There's a weird too fast scroll acceleration.