A few days ago I got so frustrated with Korean Airlines’ online booking system I decided to share the horror with the rest of the world.
I admit, because of what I do I am a bit more sensitive about bad web pages. Sometimes I overreact and get cranky (you web designers know what I mean). But this is the second time I’ve ever gotten so far as to write about my bad experience on the web.
The whole thing started the previous night, when I lost my patience with their web site and called the sales line to make the order with a live person. I was surprised that the toll free number connected me to the USA (I live in Europe). The overseas call was paid by Korean Airlines so I did not care. I was connected to a nice lady, who spent about 20 minutes with me trying to find the right flight. What was very surprising to me was that she couldn’t email me the options she found, that my only options were either to buy the flight right then and there or write down all the times and flight numbers and hope I could find the paper again the next time I call the sales line. The lady was so kind and helpful I took a deep breath and wrote down all the details. Which I lost the next day, so I had to give the web a second chance.
I was buying two long distance flights for approximately three thousand dollars
The next morning I opened the Korean Airlines site, which is a narrow (760px) stripe looking a bit funny in the middle of my big monitor. Approximately 90% of the narrow space was covered with ads, menus and options I did not care about. What I needed was the flight booking form displayed using gray on gray tiny font, where the select boxes with dates are so small the data does not even fit and is partially hidden.
(This is a screenshot in actual size, the letters blending into each other is what gets displayed on the actual site)
When filling this form one has to choose the continent and then the city for the departing and return destinations. It is not possible to type in the airport code, or the date, which has to be selected from a miniature calendar. This turned out to be quite annoying when I filled out the form for the tenth time.
The next page showed the date I had selected with a price matrix displaying three previous and following days. I was flexible in the dates, so I wanted to make sure the previous or following weeks are not significantly cheaper, but I could not change the dates in the matrix, I had to go back to the home screen and keep filling the booking form again and again. Filling the stupid form from scratch every single time!
After about ten iterations I found the flight I wanted for $1200 and proceeded to selecting the flight times and other usual stuff. After 10 minutes of fine-tuning our journey to the maximum degree of perfection I realized I forgot to add my soon-to-be wife (I was booking a honeymoon) and I could not add another passenger at this point.
I had to start all over again.
At this moment I was getting really irritated, so the next obvious thing was that I made a mistake in the date. My excuse: I could not clearly see the date in the booking form, because it was half hidden in the small “select” box. When I discovered my mistake, the only option was to start all over again.
The next attempt got me almost there. I had gone through the price matrix, times, and even the inconvenient login form, this time I typed my and my girlfriend's names and proceeded to the checkout, gave my card number, billing address, expiration date, security code and all that. At the final check I realized my girlfriend will have different name after the wedding. Being so far in the process I could not believe I could not go back to change the name and my only option was to start all over again!
![]()
I thought it will go fast this time. But after filling the destinations, dates and number of passengers, the price had changed and the flights were now $350 more expensive.
And here I have to admit I lost control and almost broke the keyboard.
I had spent almost two hours with this, did not accomplish anything and felt angry and defeated for the rest of the day.
How is it possible that airlines with billion dollar budgets give such a poor user experience when they’re booking a ticket - the most crucial part of their business? Fixing this problem by adding a back button is probably less expensive then the tickets I have bought. Changing the layout of their web, such that users can see the important information, would cost less than what KA must have paid for the phone call I made the to customer support centre?
How can a company be so ignorant and blind about how users interact with their systems?
The Danish appliance retailer, Punkt 1, has just released an ad that sums up the problems of the online industry in 31 seconds and two boobs (or four, depending on how you define "boob").
Summary: Are you confused by the offers for cheap appliances? Look here. Pris = Price (i.e. low price). Prut = Haggle (name your own price). WWW = WWW.
"Confused? I know what you're feeling. Come down to Punkt 1, we make sure you go home with the right product at the right price."
Curiously, after having characterized competing media/techniques as something from a cheap sideshow, Punkt 1 immediately offers vacuum cleaners at a 20% discount (Spar = Save). Uh...and you claim you don't belong to ANY of these groups? Hypocrites!
But there are three more serious problems. All of them relate to the portrayal of the web as an air-headed bimbo.
First, the clear suggestion is that the web is merely a sexually driven con game, which it certainly is not. Searches on Google for business-to-business and business-to-consumer information now outnumber searches for porn.
Second, the advertising agency that produced this crap apparently believes this (and the Punkt 1 marketing team bought into this goofy concept). In general, ad agencies steadfastly refuse to accept the dynamics of online communication and do their best to twist electronic media until it looks like print. Sorry, things don't work that way.
Third, the Danish business community continues to ignore the fact that the WWW is now the number one source of business intelligence. Stick that in your marketing mix and smoke it.
Two days ago, I heard from a well-rounded business executive that "we see our website as our subsidiary in cyberspace." Yikes. I wrote this 11 years ago in
Practical Information Architecture. This notion has been out of date for at least six years. Today, your website needs to be an integral part of your business plan. Think, are your telephones your subsidiary in the communications infrastructure? Hardly!
Punkt 1, you should be ashamed of yourselves for promoting these various myths. You are harming your business (when I bought my expensive dishwasher a few months ago, I didn't even visit Punkt 1 because your site was so lousy). By espousing this uninformed attitude, you are actually harming Denmark's GNP (Gross National Product). And I won't even go into the matter of sexism.
Friends of the user-experience community: we will never grow and mature until our potential clients understand that crap like this particular advertisement are ultimately not in anyone's interest.
Punkt 1, for what it cost you to produce this abomination, you could have put together a website that actually built your brand and contributed actively to your bottom line. Rethink your strategy. There is money to be made.
What are the so-called benefits for a company that offshores? More importantly, what are the dangers?
Why companies go offshore
Mostly, offshoring occurs in order to reduce wages related to folks on an assembly line. In these cases, the only winners are the owners of the company. Yet this form for "profitizing" is a double-edged sword.
When offshoring industrial products, workers are usually not required to think - they probably aren't even encouraged to do so. But because wages are cheap, production efficiency doesn't have a high priority. Alas, failure to empower your assembly line to think causes quality problems to remain unnoticed too long. And there will be no manufacturing innovation whatsoever.
How offshoring can kill innovation
Innovation is not invention - although it builds on inventions and the related best-practices that evolve. Specifically, innovation means solving a problem. Here's an example of assembly line innovation. A woman ran a machine that stamped out rubber parts from a flat mat that was fed into the cutting die. Looking around the production hall, she noticed that her machine was the bottleneck - it was the single slowest operation. She also noticed that the die travelled 6 inches each time a new sheet of rubber entered. Yet the rubber was only 1/4 inch thick. The travel time was considerable, as were the security measures that prevented fingers from getting caught in the machine. She suggested reducing the travel to about 1/2 inch. This was done and total production for the facility increased by over 70%. True story.
Alas, most employees just do what they're told and don't ask questions or suggest improvements. So much for in-line innovation.
Offshoring and agile development
Successful offshoring (and outsourcing) also requires the original manufacturer to specify details to an incredibly minute degree. The specification alone can take hundreds or thousands of man-hours. Yet in most instances, this document only serves as a legal cover-my-ass tool when litigation arises because something is not done correctly, not an instrument designed to promote efficiency.
In software development, "agile" is currently the method of choice if you're really interested in benefiting from the combined wisdom of your team. Most offshoring/outsourcing models don't allow this, which is why the Ukraine, Romania, and India, are generally awful choices for offshoring of software development, not because of the quality of the work, but because of the lack of feedback and dialog. You want a team that thinks and spots errors in the specification, not one that just follows orders. And ideally, one would think that low-income countries would be better off building their own economies instead of fostering a community of wage slaves.
How to kill a brand
Brand is another issue. Today, Burberry in the UK has offshored all of its clothing production to China, with the exception of its famous trench coats. Georg Jensen “Danish” jewelry is made in Thailand. Even the iconic American Radio Flyer "little red wagon" is now produced in China - and 45 former employees in Chicago are out of work.
Will I buy another Radio Flyer? No. Today, it’s just more plastic junk from China; the brand has been devalued and no longer represents an American company.
Should I buy an expensive Georg Jensen ring from a high-street shop? Or should I travel to Chang Mei and buy one on the street from the same worker who toils at Georg Jensen during the day and files and hammers at home during the evening. “Royal Copenhagen” china is also made in – well – not China, but Thailand.
I'd be interested to hear from folks who can tell me when offshoring is truly in the interest of the company and their customers.
I’m thinking a lot about the shopping experience these days. And as my wife just returned from a weekend in Cairo, Egypt, we’ve talked a lot about bazaars.
In a strange way, this seems related to some of the issues we ponder when creating e-commerce experiences. Findability in particular, doesn't seem to be a universally positive trait.
In the built environment – and quite apart from the cultural issues (American-style malls are sterile and repetitive) - I suspect the true value of a bazaar is that it creates an atmosphere of discovery. After all, who has ever made a good shopping discovery in a sterile and repetitive environment? That’s why people of all cultures flock to their local equivalent of a bazaar, flea market, boot sale, bargain bin, Loehmann’s Back Room, etc.
Antiquarian book collectors speak of “sleepers.” These are rare volumes that have been overlooked (and underpriced) by the shop owner. If you want to find a sleeper, you have to find a cluttered shop, plow through the teetering stacks, and probe the mildewed boxes. It is rare to find a sleeper in a posh antiquarian book shop where every volume has been perused by several experts, carefully categorized, and reverently displayed on an appropriate shelf. Dust is optional.
The Great Bazaar in Cairo is interesting. On one side of the road are shops specifically created to entice tourists. On the other side of the road, you’ll find the Egyptians. Both sections are exciting. But the south side is honest; the north side is pure fantasy.
Today, in our eagerness to promote findability, we have perhaps neglected serendipity. Not that messy design can effectively recreate the bustle of a bazaar or the claustrophobia of a junk shop, but we probably should be thinking about ways to encourage exploration and discovery as a way to enhance the user experience.
[recaptcha_form]
