British Airways - at last some good news

A usability study was recently performed on ten of the world's leading airline websites to determine how easy or difficult it is to find information. Since airline security has become so tight in recent times, the usability study focused on how easy or difficult it was to find information on banned or restricted luggage. The study found that British Airways, by far had the most user friendly website. The Malaysia Airlines website had the lowest rating.

The following task was asked of 1,000 participants (100 per website):

“You are taking an overseas holiday next month. Before you go you want to check whether certain items are considered by the airline to be dangerous or banned. Using the website how can you do this?”

Each airline website had one page dedicated to banned or restricted items. If the participants found the appropriate page they were deemed to have completed the task successfully, otherwise they were considered to have failed it, or they abandoned the task if it all became too hard.
The results indicate that finding information on dangerous and banned items is rather difficult.

Based on the ISO definition of usability, an overall usability score was given for each website based on three criteria:

1. Task Completion Rates
2. Average Time To Complete The Task
3. Ease Of Use Rating

British Airways led the way in most areas with a task completion rate of 71%, compared to Malaysia Airlines which had a lowly task completion rate of only 31%. Other interesting data shows that it takes over 3 minutes to find the relevant information on the Malaysia Airlines and Virgin Atlantic websites, whereas on the British Airways website, it took 87 seconds.

This report was generated entirely from results obtained through running a usability study with Loop11.

Associated Link: Airline website usability: full in-depth report

Passwords that are Simple - and Safe
Source: MIT Technology Review, 29 July 2010
 
Researchers at Microsoft have come up with a way to create easy-to-remember passwords without making a system more vulnerable to hackers.

Coercing people into a Brave New digital World
Source: Spiked, 27 July 2010
 
Does a government-backed campaign to get the entire UK adult population online threaten to make cyber slaves of us all?

iPhone 4 one month on – A user experience and functionality success, despite antenna issues
Source: Webcredible, 26 July 2010
 
Webcredible Senior Consultant, Abid Warsi suggests that the impressive functionality and user experience of the iPhone 4 is enough to overcome the widely reported technical issues, thus proclaiming the device a big success.

Darwin City Council Website - Australia’s Most Usable!
Source: Loop11, 24 July 2010
 
Darwin City Council came out on top in a recent website usability study of Australia's capital city councils. The aim was to discover which of the six council websites was the most user friendly and usable.

Digital Design Jobs first to experience Growth
Source: UN, 23 July 2010
 
The marketing and design industry in the UK is seeing strong signs of renewed confidence, according to the new European Market Eye report from the industry’s specialist recruitment consultancy, Aquent.

Usability at a Glance
Source: usability-ed, 22 July 2010
 
Something interesting and useful to print out and stick on your wall.

Google may know your Desires before You do
Source: New Scientist, 21 July 2010
 
In future, your Google account may know your birthday and anniversaries, consumer gadget preferences, preferred hobbies and pastimes, even favourite foods. It will also know where you are.

Closing the Usability Gap between Enterprise Applications and Consumer Web Applications
Source: Integrated Solutions for Retailers, 20 July 2010
 
New White Paper on Workforce Management and the increasingly ancient software which controls it.

Collect Words, not just Numbers with Feedback Analytics
Source: CMS Wire, 19 July 2010
 
Tracking visitors’ behaviors online can help us understand how customers use a site - but what if you could actually ask each individual a question? That’s what Kampyle aims to do with its feedback analytics tools.

Back to the Future...
Source: ZDNet, 17 July 2010
 
Always a popular sport, comparing the PC with the motor industry is as relevant as ever.