Why I Love Southwest Airlines
I'm employed as an IA at a fortune 500 company focused on the travel industry. I try to be a good little IA and check up on our competitor's sites from time to time. Sometime in the past couple of weeks, Southwest Airlines pushed a new home page out to their site. Big Kudos to SW, the home page is wonderful. I've always been turned off by all of the airlines sites. They are extremely cluttered and have way too much "Form" action going on at the home page level. Let me count the things I love about what they have done:
See it Here
Hierarchy
They have put significant visual weight on the actions that travelers need most when coming to their site. I'm talking about the buttons...you saw them right? Of course you did. It's the first thing I saw. It's strange how I noticed them before the big "Hero" photo in the middle of the page...maybe the buttons loaded first..I can't remember.
All of the secondary information is in the bottom-right side of the page. From the global navigation, down to the large action buttons, and all the way down to the secondary information that does not need much weight...the visual hierarchy of this page and information is picture perfect as far as I'm concerned. Someone might say that the large imagery is "secondary" and holds too much weight, but this is the travel industry and a little travel inspiration to get folks "pumped up" is a good thing.
Travel Alert
This is great. Would be even better if it slid open and did not take the user too far away from those great booking and special offers buttons on the home page that convert to dollars for Southwest. There is a lot of red on the page already (the breast of the airplane image, the tagline in the photo, the buttons) so 'travel Alert" in the same color is not really an "Alert' anymore. Maybe a slightly bigger icon, slightly larger font or something of that nature to separate it from the other content. Good location in the top left though.
Progressive Disclosure Link
I'm back to the buttons again...Southwest designers (and IA's maybe) are not forcing customer (like my Grandma) to wade through a sea of form clutter to find what they need. The buttons give the customer enough scent to know where to go next. They only have to see what they want to see. On top of that, clicking these buttons does not take the person away from the page. It's very non-intrusive.
I see a "More" link on this page as well, good stuff. If the customer wants to see more, it's there for them. nothing is being shoved in the customer's face here. There is not one single form entry field on this page....wow.
Some things I did not care for:
- The global nav and the section headers below the graphic are the same images, same color, for the most part. At first glance I thought it was a secondary navigation and actually hovered over it to try to click on it.
- I realize there is not much room for the widget elements under each button, but the labels for each entry field under each button are different. Some are bold, some left-aligned and not bold, some on top of the field and bold, etc.
See it Here
Hierarchy
They have put significant visual weight on the actions that travelers need most when coming to their site. I'm talking about the buttons...you saw them right? Of course you did. It's the first thing I saw. It's strange how I noticed them before the big "Hero" photo in the middle of the page...maybe the buttons loaded first..I can't remember.
All of the secondary information is in the bottom-right side of the page. From the global navigation, down to the large action buttons, and all the way down to the secondary information that does not need much weight...the visual hierarchy of this page and information is picture perfect as far as I'm concerned. Someone might say that the large imagery is "secondary" and holds too much weight, but this is the travel industry and a little travel inspiration to get folks "pumped up" is a good thing.
Travel Alert
This is great. Would be even better if it slid open and did not take the user too far away from those great booking and special offers buttons on the home page that convert to dollars for Southwest. There is a lot of red on the page already (the breast of the airplane image, the tagline in the photo, the buttons) so 'travel Alert" in the same color is not really an "Alert' anymore. Maybe a slightly bigger icon, slightly larger font or something of that nature to separate it from the other content. Good location in the top left though.
Progressive Disclosure Link
I'm back to the buttons again...Southwest designers (and IA's maybe) are not forcing customer (like my Grandma) to wade through a sea of form clutter to find what they need. The buttons give the customer enough scent to know where to go next. They only have to see what they want to see. On top of that, clicking these buttons does not take the person away from the page. It's very non-intrusive.
I see a "More" link on this page as well, good stuff. If the customer wants to see more, it's there for them. nothing is being shoved in the customer's face here. There is not one single form entry field on this page....wow.
Some things I did not care for:
- The global nav and the section headers below the graphic are the same images, same color, for the most part. At first glance I thought it was a secondary navigation and actually hovered over it to try to click on it.
- I realize there is not much room for the widget elements under each button, but the labels for each entry field under each button are different. Some are bold, some left-aligned and not bold, some on top of the field and bold, etc.
posted by basin at 10:34 AM
2 Comments:
Nice review of SW. As an IA, what are your thoughts on redesigning the homepage and not the rest of the site?
I think if a design team is told to overhaul a home page and there is no flexibility in changing some key elements of the interior pages to help guide the user correctly from where they started, then there are bound to be problems.
I think SW knows a lot that we do not. Maybe, through their own testing and research, they realized they were not giving people clear hints on which track to follow to reach their goal...but once they got in, they were fine and had no issues.
I don't think it's necessary to redesign an entire site as long as you make sure the underlying navigation design/structure and elements are consistent throughout the site. It looks like SW kept a similar color scheme so that helps as well...nothing drastic.
At a conference, a consultant told me a story about how one of his clients(online DVD sales company) was not happy with their online revenue and wanted a complete overhaul of their site. The consultants suggested moving a search widget that was very close to an ad for "Kids DVDs". The widget was moved away from that advertising section and the conversion rate increased by something like 25%. Apparently, the whole problem was that users thought the search widget was for searching kids movies only. I wonder how much the consulting firm invoiced the DVD company?
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