greg-wood.co.uk

Since we were flying around a lot on the trip, we had a lot of experience with airports. Now airports are important places for obvious reasons. Millions of people pass through airports everyday. More importantly, millions of people use airports everyday. If elements of the airport don’t work correctly, if people can’t use them easily, a lot of time and money can be wasted, not to mention frustration on the part of the user.

Good usability, bad usability

Auckland airport in New Zealand was a dream. We were there for about two hours, during which time we managed to grab our baggage, change terminals, recheck in our baggage for our connecting flight and get to the correct gate without even thinking “where do we go now then?” Getting from one terminal to the next is a right ballache in many airports. Never have I walked out the main entrance of one terminal to be presented with a large list of ways to get to the next terminal. I could wait in this spot for a free bus that comes every 15 minutes, I could grab a taxi from the taxi rank 20 meters from me (signposted) or I could follow a bright blue line on the pavement that ran all the way to the next terminal. It even told me approximately how long the walk would take and how much a taxi should cost. Just what one needs after a tiring flight. In between changing terminals, I never once found myself wandering aimlessly looking for a toilet or a place to get some food.

Compare all this to the arrivals section of terminal 2 Heathrow. You’ve picked up your bags, flown through immigration, walked through the arrivals lounge past all the people with name cards and out onto the street. There appears to be no place for pick ups unless you’re using a taxi or a bus, which is disconcerting because you have a friend picking you up. Cars that aren’t taxis aren’t allowed to stop here, let alone pull over so you can bundle into the back seat. When your lift arrives you’ll have to watch them drive past unless you find somewhere else. Terminal 2 departures is around the corner, which does have a handy pick up/drop off section, but to get there you have to run a gauntlet of cars and buses with no pavement. Add the fact that you have to carry your suitcases and also that you haven’t slept in 22 hours and you have a scene from a very tragic comedy.

Common Sense

I like to think of myself as quite a logical-minded person, so whenever I encounter something that’s unnecessarily difficult to use, it infuriates me. Heathrow is one of the largest airports in the world and it’s surprising to me that it’s so broken. It makes me wonder how many people get frustrated or angry on a daily basis just attempting to navigate it.

When you’re trying to use something that isn’t easily usable, you think of solutions to fix it. More often than not, these solutions are common sense. At Heathrow terminal 2 departures, why can’t they just let regular cars pick people up from where the taxi rank is. The rank’s never 50% full, you could allocate the other 50% for passenger pick ups. Or at least they could provide a pavement or walkway to the departures section (signposted please!) which already has such a facility.

Fixing usability problems is a question of common sense, so arguably they shouldn’t exist at all.

Website usability

Most websites aren’t half as complex as an international airport, so creating easily usable experiences is easy. The visitor should always know where they are, where they can go and what they’ll find when they get there. They should know why they’re on the site in the first place (they’ve searched for a relevant term) and should know immediately if they arrived here by mistake.

All this can be administered with the use of some helpful navigation and clear readable headers and sub-headers. No rocket science here as you can see, which is why it gets on my nerves when I get lost on a site.

Feedback

I’d like to see if others feel the same way about usability. Do you have to consider it when mocking up a design or does it come naturally with common sense? Do you test out designs on others to make sure people who aren’t so web savvy can use it? Do you even think about it at all? Comments please!