usability grades: checking the flight status on an airline

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I’ve tried checking the flight status from a mobile device for a number of different airlines this year.  Both flights I was taking to check they are leaving on time and for flights arriving with friends/family.  I then tried a few others for the purposes of this blog entry.  Care to guess which of these airlines inspired the blog entry?

Remember the goal is simple:
Check when a flight is departing or arriving given two airport codes for the current date.

Alaska Airlines – alaskaair.com
Steps:

  1. Click flight status
  2. Defaults to today, but the only option is flight number.  Click “lookup” to get the flight number
  3. Enter the two city codes.  One of mine was SAN (San Diego).
  4. Alaska comes back with a list of cities beginning with “san”.  The first is San Antonio. Um no. I meant San Diego which has the airport code I typed in.
  5. Then I have to pick month/day/year from drop downs. No shortcut for today?  No inference of the year?
  6. After all that work, Alaska shows Shows me the scheduled times of the flight.  I now have to remember the number and retype it on the flight status page

Grade: C.  This was a tremendous amount of work to get the answer. They did have a mobile view and each page loaded fast though some were 24KB – quite large for a mobile view.

American Airlines – aa.com
Steps:

  1. Wow there’s a lot of choices here.  I think the one I need is “Gates and times/wifi”.
  2. Enter codes with option to look them up.  Assumes we are talking about today.
  3. Lists departure and arrival times

Grade: B.  The double take at all the options wasn’t obvious, but possible to figure out.  Everyone else calls it “flight status” American.  Why can’t you?

Continental – continental.com
Steps:

  1. Click flight status
  2. Click “don’t know flight number”
  3. Enter two cities, assumes today
  4. Shows list of all scheduled flights.
  5. Click the one you want and shows departure arrival times.

Grade: A. Lots of options and easy to use

Delta – delta.com
Steps:

  1. Click flight status and updates which is conveniently the first option
  2. Enter codes with option to look them up and select the radio button for cities instead of flight number.   Assumes we are talking about today.
  3. Lists departure and arrival times

Grade: A-.  I shouldn’t have to select the radio button.  Once I type in an airport code, it’s apparent that is the option I want.  Presenting me with the screen with an error that I didn’t enter a flight number is less friendly than it could be.

JetBlue – jetblue.com
Steps:

  1. Click Flight Status
  2. Select departure and arrival cities from a drop down menu.  I suppose this is easier than expecting people to know/lookup the code, but it took me a couple tries to select the correct entry from the drop down.  Defaults to today.
  3. Lists departure and arrival times

Grade: B+. I have to subtract for the drop down.  It assumes extra and unnecessary dexterity.

Southwest – southwest.com
Steps:

  1. Click flight status
  2. Choose cities from the same style pulldowns I didn’t like on JetBlue
  3. Lists departure and arrival times

Grade: B+. Same reason as JetBlue.

United – united.com
Steps:

  1. Click flight status
  2. Assumes talking about today.  Enter codes with option to look them up.
  3. Lists departure and arrival times

Grade: A. No unnecessary obstacles.

    Conclusion
    Quite the range in usability here.  I was happy to see that Alaska was by far the worst.  They prompted this blog post after all.

    how toastmasters helped me present

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    If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that Scott and I both gave a presentation at the Server Side Java Symposium.  (see summaries).  What you may not know is that I am a member of Toastmasters and it helped me present.  Here’s how.

    Writing the presentation

    My presentation was low on words.  Not as low as I would have liked, but I was comfortable with it. (I haven’t gotten my speaker feedback yet; will be interesting to see if it says to use more words.)  I was able to present without notes, use humor and tell a story.

    Toastmasters also let me practice my costume to make sure I was comfortable with the antlers.

    Preparation at TSSJS

    A mentor from Toastmasters reminded me to look for a few things in advance of my presentation.  One advantage to being the very last talk is that it gives you plenty of time to scope things out.  Things to check for included:

    • the size of the room (about 150 seats)
    • how to advance slides(keyboard)
    • how big is the stage (not very and having a giant banana talking up part of it doesn’t help)
    • are questions at the end or throughout (mixture)

    While speaking

    I expected that I would be able to make good eye contact, use my hands and use the space from practicing with Toastmasters.  Well, two out of three isn’t bad.  I didn’t have much space to move without being hidden by the podium/banana on one side and falling off the stage on the other.

    Back at Toastmasters, I had given a speech called “The Case of the Distracted Audience” where I assigned people annoying things to do so I could practice how I would react.  I’m glad I did because Mark Spritzler raised his hand during my presentation and asked a question that was basically a private joke.  His point was that I should relax.  If I hadn’t practiced distractions, that would have thrown me.

    Finally, I got to take advantage of another opportunity from being last.  One of the keynote speakers commented that there are only two IDEs, Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA.  Awkward given the NetBeans proponents who also spoke.  I happened to have a slide that shows Eclipse and IDEA as the IDEs used by CodeRanch.  This was a great opportunity to break the tension and make a joke by referencing what happened earlier.  Shared conference culture.

     

    Live Blogging with an iPad – part 2

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    iPad with Keyboard and DockScott wrote about his iPad live blogging from The Server Side Java Symposium flurry of posts.  While I wrote a little bit about the iPad at the time, I too wish to reflect.  My perspective is a bit different since I operated almost exclusively with the touch screen keyboard.

    My path to blogging

    Since this was the first time I was live blogging from my iPad, I was learning as I went.  I encountered a few things that didn’t work over the course of a day and a half.

    WordPress iPad App

    I was excited to see there was an app for WordPress.  I tried this app at home and it was fine.  Turns out it was fine because I was typing everything in one setting.  Problems:

    1. Despite indications to the contrary you can only have one draft in the iPad app at a time.  This wouldn’t be so bad if they provide a warning when you try to create a new draft.  Instead they silently delete the first draft.  FAIL.  I lost a whole blog entry that way.  The website indicates you can have multiple drafts, but it didn’t work when I tried it.
    2. One of my blog entries posted twice.
    3. I learned of other even worse problems that I didn’t encounter first hand.  Scared me sufficiently to jump ship though.

    The WordPress web page

    I started out happily typing in the wordpress app.  Then I got to a screenful of content and no scroll bars appeared.  Using one finger to scroll scrolled the whole page and not the textarea.  (see below for solution) My blog posts tend to be long.  Since I didn’t know how to scroll, I deemed the web page approach unusable and looked for a better solution.

    Notes

    I spent a while typing my text in Notes and copy/pasting it into the WordPress app.  This worked ok, but I got frustrated typing HTML characters.

    HTML Editor

    I thought HTML editor would solve my problems with Notes because it would be less tedious to type “<“.  Turns out not so much.  While the “<” was on the main screen, the “/” was still not.  (Anyone know of an HTML editor that is easier to use.)  Granted this wouldn’t be a problem on a Bluetooth keyboard because then all the keys are on a keyboard.  More importantly, the editor didn’t wrap text making it hard to read what I wrote.

    The WordPress web page – redux

    I later learned that you can scroll in the textarea by using two fingers.  Once I figured out how to scroll, I stayed with the web page for my blogging.  I’m wondering if the two finger scroll is supposed to be something “everyone knows” ?

    The Bluetooth keyboard

    Scott lent me his Bluetooth keyboard to try out for blogging a session. Unsurprisingly, it feels like a real keyboard so I touch type faster and more accurately than on the iPad directly. It’s also really easy to configure. Scott paired it to my iPad right in front of me.

    I wouldn’t buy one for two reasons:

    1. The point of an iPad is to have less to lug around. I can’t see myself carrying a metal keyboard.
    2. I wouldn’t use it often so it’s not worth it for me.

    Why it is useful:

    1. HTML is so much easier to type on a real keyboard. To the point where I am still actively avoiding it when typing on the iPad.
    2. It’s great having arrow keys to move between lines. Turns out I didn’t miss that at all when I was typing on the iPad because then using my finger on the touch screen was convenient. With the iPad screen a good 6 inches from my hands, I revert to my “use the keyboard over the mouse for almost everything” habits.
    3. You get a full screen on the iPad since they keyboard isn’t using half of it. While this is cool, it turns out not to matter for me, because I’m watching the speaker and only looking at the screen rarely to see what the iPad has “auto-uncorrected” for me.

    Basically, it’s not better enough to be worth it for my usage pattern.

    An interesting side note: I forgot the part where you have to look for a few keys when you get a new keyboard like the “end” button.

    Conclusion

    I’m surprised how fast my iPad typing speed has gotten. I am able to touch type with all ten fingers at a “fast enough” speed. And I can often do so without looking at the keyboard. Unless I need a single quote of course. Then I need to look to find the special symbols button.

    Also, turning off autocorrect helped as Scott noted.  This helps because the iPad un-corrects technical words. There are a lot of those at a conference. The downside is that turning off auto correct also turns off spellcheck. I could still use spellcheck.

    All in all, it took a day, but I am able to blog on the iPad in a sustainable fashion.  Six thousand words later, I had fun doing this.

    I got a tip yesterday to turn off auto correct.