United+Airlines

Yifu Ma
 * United Airlines [|Link]**



The website did well on the low-level items. The website used column layout for the main content and separate them to 3 columns. This layout present the information clearly to user and consider most people's reading habit (from left to right), they put the most essential part of the website (Book Flight, Check in, and Flight statue) on the left, and use the most obvious spot in the middle column for beautiful picture. The right column will be read last and it is least noticeable so only information like rules and regulations are there. The fonts they choose is really readable and font color and background colors have really high contrast so the words are really visible. They use 3 different color to separate the columns so you could easily identify different columns. They used a warm color as background color for the right column which contain rules, requirements, and regulations to provide a more user friendly enviroment. For other part of the page include menus and other 2 columns, the web-site mostly blue and white which is expected because those are the color of bright sky.
 * Low-level items (spelling, fonts, colors, layouts, etc.)**

The navigation menus remain on the same locations for all pages on the websites. It is really easy to navigate through the menu since it provide informative labels for their purpose and the wording is really clearly written and user will not get confused. The error handling is not so well, it will only pop up an error warning if you failed to provide an input to from and to input field but not if you put an non-existing airport you could still click search and it will proceed to a new page content exactly same panel. This is not really necessary, they could just ask user to reenter a valid input instead of taking them to a new page and let user spend another few seconds waiting. The wording is also not really consistent, in Book Flight tab it has Multi-city under the from and to field but in Redeem Miles tab it has Multi-airport. Even thought they have same meaning but the web-site used 2 different words which could cause some user to get confused. The web-site permit easy reversal of actions, at any time you could go back to previous page with back button of the web-browser without worry about losing any input you made previously. This is really useful since you could always go back if you choose the wrong time or date, or just want to take a different flight.
 * Middle-level aspects (consistency, error handling, writing style, menu design, etc.)**

At any step of the process, there is always a progress bar near the top of the page that indicate your current location in the purchase process. This is really nice since this make user feel that they are actually making progress and they will less likely to get the frustrated by the long purchase process. They also allow multiple way to precessed base on the experience of the user, one of the example is the from and to field. Those fields could be filled in 2 ways, one is using the Find airport tool and the another is directly input the airport name. For frequent traveler, they could quickly input the airport IAD and for other users who don't know the airport name, they could use the Find airport tool to achieve the same goals. The web-site try to protect user information by use HTTPS during the purchase process so the connection is protected against eavesdropping and use SSL certificate to transmit credit card information.
 * High-level concepts (information architecture, navigation, audience appeal, privacy protection, credibility, etc.)**