Fly the Friendly Cyber Skies
For those of you that haven't flown them, click over to www.easyjet.com and pretend that you are taking a short trip between two European cities (that is where it flies). In putting together my itinerary for a trip to Europe last fall, it took me about three minutes to find, price and book my flights. The site is really a shining example for the rest of the airline industry: There is clear indication of where you are in the process (with progress indicators at the top of each screen). There is a logical flow to the whole bookings process, and the fees are clearly labeled. Ironically, the cost of my actual flight was about half of the ultimate ticket, with all the various landing taxes that I had to pay. But that isn't the fault of the airline, and it got points for showing you me clearly what I are being charged.
The EasyJet home page is a study in compactness. You can find out its on-time record, its entire route schedule, immediately get into booking a trip, change your reservation or search for something when it isn't immediately obvious where it is. A set of menus runs across the top of the page -- where you would normally look for them -- and they are in plain text rather than some fancy graphical button or other visual pollution. If you are just flying one-way, you don't have to go to another menu system or click on another link; instead, you use the same home page dialog boxes that a roundtrip purchaser would use.
Often, businesses use the diner model of product differentiation, offering pages and pages of different choices, so many that you cover almost every possible need of your customer. But you don't go to a diner to order filet mignon. Most people have an omelet or a burger. The challenge for our times is to make things easy. That means reducing the amount of options to avoid confusion, but not to the point where consumers feel they don't have many choices and walk away in frustration.
The implications for the Web are obvious:
1) Don't trick up your pages with lots of bells and buttons.
2) Keep the design clear and clean.
3) Make it obvious what the choices are when there are choices.
Contrast that experience with American Airlines' Web site, at aa.com. One of my biggest frustrations is on a Mac the pages load very slowly, so I have taken to using a Windows PC when it comes time to book with it. And while it offesr plenty of options, the menu system is convoluted and the number of pages that you have to visit is at least double that of EasyJet's. And some things you can't do via the Web, such as add your frequent-flyer number to an existing reservation (at least, I couldn't figure out where to do this). I do like the numerous notification options: You can have AA call your cell, send you e-mail or page you with update flight arrival and departure status. Of course, if you have already left for the airport, that doesn't do you much good -- these days it seems like you almost have to leave a day before you fly to allow enough time to transit the security barriers and fight your way to your gate.
The EasyJet model is ripe for other industries, and there are reports of a U.K.-based cell phone company trying something similar. Reducing the number of options is key toward gaining customer confidence and credibility, as well as making customes feel secure they they got the fairest price for the goods and services.
Make it easy, and you will thrive in these times of confusion.