Details Matter in Usability
I just finished booking a flight for business on Southwest Airlines. I generally like to fly SWA, but I had an experience in their checkout that irritated the heck out of me. Had I not already shopped on different travel sites and found their fares to be the best and offering the shortest flight time, I might have bagged it altogether.
I live in St. Louis. When I typed in “St.” to indicate my city, I was greeted with an error message, stating that a period (.) was an illegal character.
I clicked the back button, and changed it to “Saint” and hit enter. I was rewarded with another error, this time warning that I had some sort of problem with using the back button. Subsequent attempts at salvaging my session failed. I finally started over altogether and was successful.
First, I can’t believe a big outfit like SWA can’t find a programmer to convert “St.” into “Saint” during the validation process. Second, I’d like to think if your booking utility would break its session by using the “back” button, you could give some sort of feedback to that effect (or better yet, build a better booking utility).
Bottom line, details matter. On the plus side, SWA has a fairly clean interface, and it’s great when it works. On the other hand, these little details that ended in user frustration may be costing them considerable sales.