"UI is an enormous challenge for all consumer Internet companies"
Published: 03 Oct 2008
By EyeforTravel.com Correspondent, Las Vegas
Travel companies have been focusing on creating rich online experiences and they continue to use "new" technologies to enhance users' interaction with their websites. The companies have been testing ideas and gathering feedback at the same time as they try to refine their offerings.
Commenting on to what extent companies have succeeded in optimising their websites to increase conversion rates, Zonder's chief executive officer Bob Barnes referred to Kayak and Hotwire as two of the better examples.
"Kayak has done a terrific job delivering tools that consumers crave without getting bogged down in the complexity. They get what consumers want. And Hotwire has designed a reviews process that's very simple. In my experience, it's easy to gather feedback, but most of the value is lost in failure to execute the changes that feedback dictated. If you're going to collect it, use it," said Barnes.
Specialists recommend KISS (keep it simple silly) approach when it comes to featuring rich online experiences.
"Depending on the focus of the site, the site owner needs to focus on the core calls to action that make sense for their business model. The major issue we have seen in the travel space when using these media types is their ability to monitor, and update their content on a timely basis. For example, unmonitored user generated content could lead to a disgruntled customer "flaming" your site for all the world to see. A simple but balanced approach to using these technologies is recommended," said Robert A. Dawson, Chief Technology Officer, E-site Marketing (Dawson shared this during EyeforTravel's Online Marketing in Travel 2008 conference in Chicago in June this year).
He added, "Supplementing your sites content with that of the social media and rich media formats is best, but avoid the temptation of overdoing it and distracting the user from the desired call to action you want them to take."
According to Barnes, UI is an enormous challenge for all consumer Internet companies.
"There are lots of conflicting opinions on what looks good and what works well. Some experts love Yahoo!'s UI and others who think it's the biggest eye sore on the Internet. So, who knows best? The numbers…they never lie," he said. "One example of what we've done to KISS is our font size on Zonder.com. It's very large. Because we have a lot of users over 40 who have a hard time reading small fonts on computer screens. So, we accommodate them."
Almost a year ago, a study involving Akamai Technologies, Inc. shared the key factors that are driving consumers' selection of online travel sites. As per the study, conducted in collaboration with Babson College, one of the study's findings concluded that one-third of travel consumers abandoned their online search after waiting for more than four seconds for their results to load.
But Barnes doesn't believe such findings. "If it was accurate, most major travel sites would be out of business. That said, there's no question that site performance is essential. It's first in our conversion funnel. Again, we're not perfect, but if we want to succeed, site performance is mission-critical."
On the same, Dawson says many studies have been done that indicate that a website should not exceed 54 kilobytes in total page weight. This will ensure that your site will load within 1.5 seconds or less.
"To that end, it is very easy for a good web development shop to design and develop an efficient website understanding this guideline. There are plenty of tools on the market that help developers optimise their graphics, Flash files, and code to meet these requirements. Where developers tend to get into trouble is when they use a lot of JavaScript includes unnecessarily, non-optimised graphic and Flash files, and the improper use of AJAX technology. This only represents the client side of things," said Dawson.
He added, "The server side can dramatically impact a sites overall performance as well. In the early days of Content Management Systems (CMS), many systems were database driven. As a result, the sites were required to make a query call to a database in order to render its baseline content. The flatter and more optimised your site is, the better it will perform. More importantly, a good web development shop should already know the tricks and techniques to achieve this."
By Ritesh Gupta
EyeforTravel.com
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