[Design Ideas] Air Canada, Bloomtools, Google Maps
March 14th, 2008 | Tags: atypical interaction, contingency design, form validation, graphic designGood design: Air Canada search form
We benchmarked several flight reservation systems over the last few years and AirCanada.com’s search form is truly one of the most usable.
(Typing “FRA” in the airport input field)
Their airport input field displays tips on focus, validates errors in real-time and, what we really like about it, suggests airports, cities, provinces, states and countries containing the 3 first characters entered. This is great contingency design helping Air Canada reduce user frustration and wasted efforts/expectations.
Bad design: Bloomtools Newsletter signup
Bloomtools is an Australian Web design company we stumpled upon. Although their site is beautiful, we must be among the few visitors to have noticed (quite accidentally) their newsletter signup form.
Not only does it look more like a graphical element than a form, it is also populated with custom-font field labels and not included in the tabbing order.
Making sometime look good should not be at the expense of making something usable. Users have already learned what a form looks like, why not take advantage of that knowledge?
Interesting design: Google Maps modifying itineraries
We find interesting the drag and drop option from the Google Maps interface.
(After looking up an itinerary)
Although first-time users might not even notice it, this type of interaction would have been very difficult to achieve with typical Web interaction. Pushing the boundaries sometimes creates good results!