Critique-Orbitz

=**Critiques - [|Orbitz]**=
 * by Aisya Aziz**



The color throughout the website is consistent - blue and white - and it is also readable. This sizes are also fine. I do believe that for search engine website, like Orbitz, would only give a few words - most of them wouldn't make a whole sentence, but good and clear enough for users to understand the meaning of the words (or easily said, readable to everyone). However, even with this exception, I found that Orbitz totally disregards language checking. For example, "Some taxes, fees additional" or "another Orbitz customer books your same flight". I feel like this cannot be accepted - the developer seemed to ignore the check completely. The overall layouts looks fine - but not attractive enough to catch people's attention; considering that there are so many competitions out there and it probably needs to be more attractive to catch people's attention.
 * Low-level Aspects**

In the consistency side of the website; I found that the one that is consistent throughout the website is the quick search dialog on the left side of the page (except in certain pages, for example, 'Deals'). I find that this is very important - because the function of the website itself is for search engine. However, I don't agree much of the menu style. I find it to be a little confusing; whether or not the user should click the titles on the menu or on the quick search dialog. Even though both wouldn't make much difference, but, if the user click on the menu, it will show some featured things that probably would be something the user would want to see. Besides that, the items on the right and bottom side of the page are, for me, a little off too. The writings are not attractive and there are just too many words. Now that I scanned through it, I could see many nice things to know of Orbitz - like Orbitz on the go, fare sales, flight deals and more featured deals. These items would probably be the one that will be able to attract customers to actually use Orbitz rather than using other engines - however, it does not stand out the way it should be.
 * Mid-Level Aspects**

As far as I see, Orbitz handled the cases where the user filled in a non-existant city or airport and a wrong date format or simply a date that has already passed. However, it would require the whole page to load in order for it to find the mistakes. I found that this is a little tiresome - for example, the user included a small local city that probably Orbitz doesn't include in the search list. Having the page to load would excite the user, only to find out a couple of seconds later that it was not included. Minor things like this would cause annoyance to the users. A better way to handle this is probably to already give a suggestion while the user was typing; or when it loses focus, immediately tell if the location or the date format is wrong. Besides that, in terms of the navigation in between searches, Orbitz did not provide information to what the user is searching for or where the user is directed to. All that is written is 'Orbitz'. For travellers who are searching for multiple destinations and times; it would be difficult for them to keep track of what they were currently searching - for multitasking purposes. This would not ease the users - and might cause the users to be less interested in looking at the site.
 * High-Level Aspects**