I love this. The boarding pass design is a nice touch, although I still feel like I'm going to fold it in a hurry to get it out of my hands and not in the way they intend.
When I saw their new boarding pass I just had to laugh. Someone awhile back went and redesigned Delta's boarding pass[1] and got a lot of crap over it for not taking into account why the boarding pass was the way it was.[2][3] But apparently someone at Virgin was taking notes.
There's a critical difference here; those redesigns are for boarding passes issued at the airport, while Virgin's are printed at home. You can get away with a lot when your common target equipment is an inkjet rather than a thermal printer.
There are still millions of people who don't have smartphones [1], for one. I'd imagine that there's a nontrivial overlap between that group and people who fly.
Agreed. Maybe it's better on a touchscreen than existing interfaces, but changing the dates for my flight to check price difference was a huge pain. I'll be sticking with google's flight search.
Just did a sample booking, and was very impressed. Some notes:
1) Some elements seem too far apart on a wider screen. Usual victim of responsive design without a max width.
2) The loading between steps is damn snappy, but feels slow sometimes due to the lack of an activity indicator. Slow is a relative term, but I instantly felt like I had done something wrong or the page wasn't responding.
Just one quirk with the home page. Read down to the bottom, and then I tried to scroll back up, and it would stop at each "Section" and would not let me just continue scrolling up.
Why? I find it absolutely horrendous personally and would avoid any webpage that used it (got to the end of the presentation on my second try as I literally rage quit the first time).
Some reasons as to why I severely dislike it:
1) When it scrolls the background changes color. There's multiple transitions going on. It's sort of like going to a different website. I lose my entire concentration and interest.
2) No scroll bar. I can't get to the final slide without painfully going slide by slide.
3) When scrolling with the mouse, I lose control of the webpage for about a second. I can keep spinning the mouse wheel but nothing is happening. It's infuriating.
I should have clarified what I meant by "sites like this". I was referring to sites which have multiple pages that are presented as a scrollable single page. Without a way to jump pages at proper page boundaries it becomes a pain to read through them. I still hope that this becomes the norm for scrolling through sites like this one.
It's very linear and seems to work well only if you have all the dates completely locked down. I really prefer the designs that make it easy to see if travelling a day earlier or later would be much cheaper. I think the other Virgin sites do this.
I am really liking this design and HTML is so clean. Anyone know what the breakdown of this stack is? A lot of the illustrations are SVG how are they animated?
This is good time to mention that scrolling is the bane of all things usable, and the person who invented it should be shot. If I wanted to lose context of my operations I would hire some guy to scream in my ear every few seconds, it would be less annoying.
Scrolling uis clearly tailored to touch devices like this one really should be an available alternative, not the only interface.
"Scrolling" is the bane of all things usable? Short of clicking on things, scrolling is probably the single most familiar and universal interaction on any computer of any form factor.
Not sure how scrolling necessitates loss of context nor how not-scrolling maintains context. The two are causally unrelated.
I think he/she is referring to the fact that the site scrolls for you (i.e. scroll hijacking), not the action of scrolling (by users).
When a site scrolls for you, it can cause you to lose context (as what you just did is no longer on the page). I feel like a more apt term might be slideshow design?
Would have been great, except for it suffers from the same problem the existing VA site suffers from. Almost every time I use the VA site, "something goes wrong". I just tried to book tickets for next week, got all the way to the end to pay, hit submit and "something went wrong". They just put a pretty front end on a broken booking system that breaks almost every time I use the site. The only thing I care about is that it works and the VA site consistently fails, this upgrade doesn't fix the core problem I've always had with it.
I've been very frustrated by this as well. I tried changing a booking with Virgin Australia earlier today and got a popup message: "Important information: an unknown error occurred. Try again."
Something is broken. I get grey backgrounds and grey text when scrolling down. Selecting text makes the correct colors show up. The background images further down the site are missing.
After reloading the page, I now get text in the same color as the background. And the down arrows are missing.
This all happens in Safari. WFM in Firefox and even in IE8 it degrades acceptably.
160 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] threadVirgin has been my favorite airline for some time, but now just went up 3.14 notches.
Odd that other people are seeing a different default.
[1] http://passfail.squarespace.com/
[2] http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-p...
[3] http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-...
1. https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/2/comS...
1) Some elements seem too far apart on a wider screen. Usual victim of responsive design without a max width.
2) The loading between steps is damn snappy, but feels slow sometimes due to the lack of an activity indicator. Slow is a relative term, but I instantly felt like I had done something wrong or the page wasn't responding.
OSX Firefox 29.0.1
2. See more dates, but not enough
3. Click show more dates
4. See more dates, but not enough
5. Click show more dates
6. Nothing happens
7. Click show more dates
8. Nothing happens
9. Give up
It seems as though Virgin America can bypass many of these because there are no (?) international flights.
The original boarding pass redesign post, to which the above was a rebuttal: http://passfail.squarespace.com/
Edit: wrong links.
Some reasons as to why I severely dislike it: 1) When it scrolls the background changes color. There's multiple transitions going on. It's sort of like going to a different website. I lose my entire concentration and interest. 2) No scroll bar. I can't get to the final slide without painfully going slide by slide. 3) When scrolling with the mouse, I lose control of the webpage for about a second. I can keep spinning the mouse wheel but nothing is happening. It's infuriating.
Scrolling uis clearly tailored to touch devices like this one really should be an available alternative, not the only interface.
"Scrolling" is the bane of all things usable? Short of clicking on things, scrolling is probably the single most familiar and universal interaction on any computer of any form factor.
Not sure how scrolling necessitates loss of context nor how not-scrolling maintains context. The two are causally unrelated.
When a site scrolls for you, it can cause you to lose context (as what you just did is no longer on the page). I feel like a more apt term might be slideshow design?
After reloading the page, I now get text in the same color as the background. And the down arrows are missing.
This all happens in Safari. WFM in Firefox and even in IE8 it degrades acceptably.
Now, how do I report it? :)