The good, the bad and the matrix: Redesigning a part of LAN.com

From the moment you decide you want, or need, to travel somewhere, to the moment you buy the tickets, can be a long way. There are many steps involved: choosing your destination, when to go, where to stay, what travel company I’ll use, what kind of tickets I’m going to buy and how much are they going to cost me. So it can be long and also not simple. Nevertheless, the arrival of internet has helped to make things a lot easier and a few clicks of distance, or that is what we supposed it should be. Sometimes… it’s not that easy.

And that’s what I found right away when I wanted to travel to Moscow with Lufthansa. I’ve bought tickets before, in LAN to be precise, and the homepage it’s very similar. But the first problem appears immediately when I tried to enter my destination. I couldn’t. The page gave me a couple of option and didn’t let me clicked on them easily. One would thought these kind of things shouldn’t happen in a big plane company, that everything would be easy, flawless, and no. So when I finally select my destination correctly, after I choose a wrong one, select a lot of things and couldn’t go on with the process, I arrived at the matrix with the dates of departure and return, with the prices, and didn’t understand the prices. Again, such a simple and elemental thing, done wrong. I didn’t know what currency was being used, till I read a paragraph up of the matrix. Also, it was one solid number, without thousands separator, that really difficult me the reading of the price. I mean, it’s really different read: 2934234,22 than $2.934.234,22. Imagine that showed 30 to 49 times on the page. Finally I never really read the whole price, as this was an exercise, but it would be a bigger problem if I have to buy those tickets.

Summarizing, it was not easy, not simple, not enjoyable, there were more problems later trying to understand the information showed, introduce the same information three or more times, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. If I have to really buy a ticket in Lufthansa, I am going to think it twice. They need to improve a lot, really.

A complete different story was the one that I observed, and then told, from my partner when he tried to buy a ticket from LAN.com. He only had two problems: one very small, the other one not so much.

The first problem was that he couldn’t find the destination he was looking for. He tried Moscow first, and never appeared on the list, neither the message that the destination wasn’t available. The only message showed by the page was: “Inserte las 3 primeras letras de: País, Ciudad”. I thought: “Well, saying that you don’t have something can be bad for business, but it saves the client time and a possible bad impression, that could be worst”. That thing can be easily solved saying that the company doesn’t have that destination so far.

The other problem, that was the one I finally decided to redesign the page, was that when there weren’t flights available for the dates and destination selected, you get something like this on the screen:

And it wasn’t effective at all. After a couple of minutes he didn’t find another available date. When he clicked on “intente otra fecha”, the page sent him back to the homepage to start all over again. Clicking on “Día anterior” or “Día siguiente” also didn’t lead him to a solution. He didn’t click one or two times at those buttons, but 10 or maybe 20. Finally he decided to travel on another date, like two month before, and everything went smoothly and flawless. The matrix showing the prices was way easier to understand. The page also used colours to show and clearly differentiate prices. The words and number were big and easy to understand. It was far better that Lufthansa’s page.

So then, after finishing the observations, I thought that the matrix of LAN was very good, and it could be used to show, automatically, the nearest dates of departure and destination. First those that are before the dates entered and then those ones after that dates. They don’t need to do anything new, just use that good designed tool and put a couple of people to find a way to find the closest flights available. Fast and easy.

After this experience, I learned that many simple things can make an experience less grateful, like don’t having thousand separators. Also, I now appreciate more the time and effort that some companies do to present their information clear and easy to understand; other companies should learn from LAN.com… like Lufthansa. I mean, the client is not fool and, if he want to, he can make the effort and understand information presented in a not so simple way. But the experience is going to be worst, and that’s bad for business.

Also, I learnt that the solution to our problems can be nearer that we think. Listening to my partner later saying that the matrix, and their colors, was easy to understand would have solved the second problem in a matter of seconds. Probably other problems aren’t going to be so simple to solved, and maybe this solution is not so simple to do as I think, but we should always look around us first when we have a problem. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel always.