I have made an interesting observation in terms of user friendliness. Let’s call it an anti-pattern…
I had booked a flight in the internet. Now the ticket was a number, which they sent to me by SMS. I went to the page of the airline and tried to do the check-in, in order to get a better seat, a lesser chance of being an overbooking-victim and to save some time and nerves at the airport.
Now it is necessary to enter some information each time, like Passport number, date of birth, my name, validity of passport and citizenship. By mistake I used the wrong citizenship without noticing and then the page asked me, if I have a Visa.
Now it was impossible to go back to fix this, so I had to cancel the whole process and enter all the information once again. At least I thought so. It was worse, because the wrong citizenship had put the whole booking into a weird status which could not be fixed anymore on the web application. It just refused to deal anymore with this ticket.
It was possible to use the app of the airline and to redo the whole thing on my tablet.
If there is information that is so important to get right, there are some suggestions:
- Allow the user to go back to any form in the dialog and revisit the entries
- Show the data that has been entered to make it easy to recognize the error
- Give the user who messed up a second chance to fix it
- The question is, why I have to enter my birthday, passport number, name etc. each time. They do not change frequently. Privacy is really a good thing, but I guess in the case of traveling by air all privacy issues are just a joke. Why not give at least some convenience?
- Anybody who happens to get the relatively short ticket number can mess around with it, which could be very annoying, if he for example canceled the flight.
