Critique+Submission+Daniel+Choi


 * Daniel Choi**

__Critique of Yahoo! Travel__

**High-level concepts **(information architecture, navigation, audience appeal, privacy protection, credibility, etc.)**:** Firstly, Yahoo Travel has good audience appeal; specifically, it is beneficial for users with Yahoo accounts. Their travel system integrates directly with users’ Yahoo accounts, so travel plans can be saved and viewed anywhere by just logging into a Yahoo account. However, a downside to the integrated account system is that creating a trip plan requires a Yahoo account. This requirement is an obstacle for users without Yahoo accounts and those users may choose to visit a different travel planning website upon being prompted to register with Yahoo.

 In terms of navigation, the website is fairly navigable. Important travel items, such as planning and booking, have their own separate webpages and similar topics are grouped together. However, with the already abundant amount of information displayed on each page, a section of the “planning” page is dedicated to a //Yahoo! Travel Buzz// widget that displays updates that various users made to their vacation travel plans. In general, this information is useless and irrelevant as I think most people do not care what changes random internet users made to their Thanksgiving travel plans. The exposure of this information brings up an issue of privacy. By default, the option to share your travel plans to the public is selected. An improvement would be to keep the option selected to private and allow options to share travel plans only with certain users on your contact list.

**Middle-level concepts **(consistency, error handling, writing style, menu design, etc.)**:**

 The website remains fairly consistent between webpages. Webpages have a similar horizontal bar of clickable categories, while subpages of each category contain the same design template, but with different content based on the category. One inconsistency is the searchable map. It is located in different positions in the //planning// and //booking// webpages and one map is larger than the other. It seems like it would have been feasible and more consistent to keep one template for the //planning// and //booking// webpages. In terms of error handling, Yahoo provides asynchronous functionality in the search bars to display location names as the user types, which prevents typos or saves time for the user. Also, to lessen the load of short-term memory for the user, a list of recently viewed items is displayed on the relevant webpages.

**Low-level concepts **(spelling, fonts, colors, layouts, etc.)**:**

 The color scheme consists of light-blue and white colors, which is pleasing to view (aesthetically). However, the default font sizes are rather small and combined with some of the light-blue texts and white background, it can become difficult to read. An improvement would be to use dark-blue colors or colors with more contrast than those of the current design.

 One of the website’s strongest points is giving feedback. Almost all of the components of each webpage use asynchronous functionality to provide instantaneous feedback without reloading the page or loading a new page. Menus immediately show a dropdown of sub-categories and the map and all other components provide some sort of “mouse-over” feedback.