Phil Oye

Well, Orbitz did a site refresh recently. Damn. They were flight reservation site of choice and they went ahead and ruined it.

Despite being the evil consortium of all the major airlines, I used them for one reason: great interface design. The matrix display for flight results was perfect. It allowed you to wade the thousands of flights efficiently and quickly. The new design, while still using the matrix display (which incidentally, is trademarked), has ruined the flight search results.

If you haven’t used Orbitz in the past, the matrix displays the flights in a grid with airlines on one axis and number of flights on the other. Each cell shows the lowest price for each airline/# of stops combination.

Clicking each cell filters the listings to that combination only. Perfect. This allows a user to make the tradeoffs about preferred airline, number of stops, and the all-important price. Thankfully, other than some visual tweaks, the matrix is unchanged.

The Orbitz Matrix

The great design didn’t stop there, however. Each airline/# of stops combination would display all trips, even if it was a freakin’ long list. This was a very good thing. I don’t care what Jakob says, scrolling is a hell of a lot more efficient than paging. But the results were extremely compact: 107 pixels of vertical real estate for a round trip (one stop each way) compared to 397 (!) pixels in the new design, without adding any addition information. I love whitespace as much as the next guy and there are some logos in there, but four times the real estate? That absolutely kills the ability to scan multiple flights because you can only view 1 to 1.5 trips at a time without scrolling.

But the poor design decisions didn’t stop there. Previously the results were in one table with separate headers for the different aspects of the flights: airlines, times, airports, price # of stops, etc. While price was justifiably the primary scanning key, it was easy to pick out the rest. The new design does not do this at all because the information is in fewer columns with bold being used for different data in the same column.

Alright, I’ve given my critique, but this redesign begs the question: how does this happen? Is a new design firm responsible for this refresh? They may have just done an audit and said that the old results were “ugly”. That might explain it because the new design is actually nicer when viewing one result. Very clean with lots of whitespace. Horrible decision, of course, when it comes to actually using it, but in a portfolio it looks good because people just show a single screenshot.

But if the same firm/team is responsible, then I have no idea how to explain it. Presumably they were conscious of what they were doing the first time. It smacks of a focus group response: “It is ugly, I don’t like it.” So now every page is 4 times longer and usability goes down, but it passes the focus group.

So, does anybody know of a good travel site? Maybe one that stole Orbitz’s old design perhaps?

This whole mess reminds me of the passing of the great Sidewalk.com. Even though it was by Microsoft, it was a phenomenal site. Microsoft then decided that they wanted out of the city directory business and essentially gave it to Citysearch, who then promptly discarded it. Citysearch has then proceeded to make each and every redesign worse. Unbelievable.

Site redesigns are supposed to make a site better.