welterweightUX

I do my UXing in the travel realm. This past week, I’ve been forced to climb outside of my US comfort zone to focus on doing a heuristic evaluation of a UK-based leisure travel website.

As part of my research, I did extensive competitive research (this should go without saying, right?) of UK sites.

The bad
Here’s what I found: Many of the UK sites I looked at are rife with eye-scorching flash ads, perplexing multi-tiered navigation, and just a general lack of informational focus.

Take Ryanair, for example. They’re a major player in the UK market who offer super low cost flights, as well as other cheap travel extras like campsites, hostels, etc. Obviously, when low price is your calling card, you don’t want to spend trillions of dollars (err…pounds) on your web presence. But Ryanair takes this to the extreme.

These are my gripes:

• The site’s IA is like a battleground where there are no winners.
• The color scheme seems like a corporate debate that no sides were able to play nice and compromise.
• The booking tool is centrally located, which is good, but its importance is negated by the giant Ryanair Charity Calendar ad and the tool’s garish school bus-coloration.
• In general, the site has me on the brink of seizing.

I could go on, but the weakness are as clear as the morning sun in July. Right?

The good
Since they launched their design last summer or so, I’ve been holding US-based Travelocity’s homepage up as a gold standard for how travel sites should look and act.

See what I mean? Here’s what makes it work for user:

• The booking tool jumps out - the ads on the side are subtle and don’t distract from the site’s true purpose: START BOOKING - NOW!
• The tabs above the booking tool prioritize (assumed) popular sections of the site. Though there’s navigation at the top of the screen, it’s purpose is secondary  and supportive - the important stuff is the booking tool and the tabs.
• The design and unobtrusive. Pleasant, even.

The brass tacks
I’m not even going to pretend that these examples are totally representative of the country of origin - to me there’s just examples of best and worst in each country. There are lots of crap and US and UX travel sites. What I will say though is that the overwhelming major UK sites I reviewed this week had egregiously bad user experiences, worse than even the bad US ones.

Finally, the question
Ok, here’s what I want to know: Do people in the UK have different expectations for what makes good user experiences or just a higher tolerance for bad ones?

Are UX and IA standards localizeable? Should they be? And how?