The app sucks, but apparently the critique is from someone who has never flown before.
How so?
How United Onboards New Users (design)
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: How United Onboards New Users (design)
#32Well this brings back memories of sitting in their plane trying to become a milageplus member. After filling in the whole form, I find that I cannot submit because the app cannot use the airplanes wifi. I know my bad for assuming that if united let you browse their webpage for flight status that surely they would let their mobile app work over the wifi as well. Worse I assumed when I got home, I would submit the form and be done but no, the session timed out and all my data entry was lost.
Re: How United Onboards New Users (design)
#33Oh the irony, criticising the mobile app about its design on a painful to use on a mobile phone slide show.
You should ask for a refund.
Re: How United Onboards New Users (design)
#34Oh the irony, criticising the mobile app about its design on a painful to use on a mobile phone slide show.
You should ask for a refund.
Not quite understanding this. The United app is also free.
And at least it has buttons that are large enough to touch with my finger without encroaching into some other div causing an unexpected zoom.
Re: How United Onboards New Users (design)
#35The app sucks, but apparently the critique is from someone who has never flown before.
How so?
Because everyone who has flown knows you need to choose these basic things when flying: Departure, Arrival, and two Departure Dates. So it's not that bad if the app won't hold your hands and tells you that you need these basic things.
Re: How United Onboards New Users (design)
#36This is probably a result of having a huge team of disempowered developers, each working on delivering a tiny slice of functionality, with a product owner lacking any kind of organizational clout. Most likely the app team is beholden to a much larger, powerful and entrenched backend division that dictates what APIs they have available and when they can use them.
This is a fairly gnarly space in general. Because of various laws, they have to collect much more data, with more granularity, than a normal e-commerce site. Like birthdates, middle initials, loyalty numbers, etc...for every passenger, not just the buyer. And searching for products is more complex as well. You have to account for cities with multiple airports, one way vs rt, displaying key info like layovers, ancillary charges for bags, many different sorts/filters etc. Oh, and inventory that appears, disappears or changes price (or terms) very rapidly. Just examples, this kind of thing is spread throughout.
Throwing the need to do this in at least 4 disparate interfaces (desktop, mobile web, Android, iOS) then amplifies any mistakes.
There isn't really any airline that does this completely right. If they get close, keeping up with business and platform changes usually breaks it at some future point.
Some things are just hard to do well on tiny screens with shitty keyboards...and X different variations of them.
Re: How United Onboards New Users (design)
#37Curious why the user didn't click back instead of on the home button around slide 70-75. It would have saved them about 50 slides or so and 10-15 minutes of real time. They clearly saw the back button later around slide 120. The micro-pessimization of looking at the account creation flow before attempting to book a flight also seemed somewhat unnecessary. While it is not an excuse for the poor design, I am not sure w…
My thoughts exactly. Of course a lot of room for improvement in all these airline apps but the person was intentionally playing dumb on a few of those steps knowing it would double the number of steps. Of course the app should have better protection and warnings to prevent that from happening but since reading that on a phone with no swipe to view next slides and having to tap that tiny arrow that often zoomed in instead shows the author may want to focus on their own app a bit first.
Re: How United Onboards New Users (design)
#38There is a lot of talk on United's folly out there. This is definitely worth a read.
Re: How United Onboards New Users (design)
#39This is probably a result of having a huge team of disempowered developers, each working on delivering a tiny slice of functionality, with a product owner lacking any kind of organizational clout. Most likely the app team is beholden to a much larger, powerful and entrenched backend division that dictates what APIs they have available and when they can use them.
or no devs at all...
Re: How United Onboards New Users (design)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so?
Because everyone who has flown knows you need to choose these basic things when flying: Departure, Arrival, and two Departure Dates. So it's not that bad if the app won't hold your hands and tells you that you need these basic things.
People who fly, like, once or twice per year (leisure travelers or travelers visiting friends and relatives (VFR)), will not know these things. There are many, many people who have never flown on a plane, too.
They make up a significant portion of total passenger volume.
Also, every other airline app gets this right.