Communication
Group: 9
Student names: Alexander Sennhauser, Beatrice
Forster, Coralie Reissner
Date: 16.5.07
Legibility
(weight: 16.5/40)
Identify
at least three labels which do not make sense.
Left side:
Package tript – We suppose
that there is a typing error and instead of tript,
they meant trip. Nevertheless, this does still not make much sense, as package
trip could mean a trip including the hotel, the flight and some other
activities. However, what this package
includes is not clearly stated anywhere.
Shared Package – the use of the word shared
is not very clear here, do they mean you share your trip with others? The
common association with the word “share” is that one takes the
flight and another person the hotel, which does not make any sense here.
Create Package – We assume this label means
that you are able to search a trip and use it to create an own package. As this
is not as clear, we suggest to rephrase it.
My account/create new – the create
new is not very well chosen, the fact that actually a new account can be
created should be mentioned; else the new is not really related to anything.
Also the logic behind the functionality is not very clear, either you have an
account (one assumes you get to this account after log in), or you don’t
and have to create a new one. So these two labels “My account” and
“create new” should be separated.
Right side:
Suggested stay: 5-7 days
– this sentence figures in the description of the
How
would you rephrase them?
Package-trip: we could replace this phrase by
“package deals”, which does imply that there are several services
included. The word deal sounds better than trip.
Shared Package: In case that here they wanted to
suggest a trip for whole groups, we suggest replacing the phrase with “group
offers”. This is less ambiguous and very clear.
Create Package : We suggest
to replace it by a title: Create your Own (like the search) and as subtitle
“package deal” (like one of the subtitles of the search). This also
looks more similar to the Search block and helps therefore in understanding the
meanings.
Additionally, we decided to group the search and create options for the
recommendations into the search and create titles we already have. This leads
to the two additional subtitles called “suggestions” (in search)
and “suggestion” (in Create your own) in the two blocks.
My account/create new – As mentioned above, the two
functions should be separated, whereby the “my account” could even
be considered redundant since we already have a login field, which usually
leads you to your account. So we suggest to replace
this label with “create new account”.
Suggested stay: We assumed that this is just an information – so it shouldn’t be marked that
important. However, in case this is meant to be a link to a certain offer, the
text could be changed to something like “Special Offer: A stay of
5–7 days! Buy now!”
Communication
consistency (weight: 16.5/40)
Identify
at least three inconsistencies in the use of the language.
1) English – French: There are French sentences in the site
(“offre du
jour” and “plan du site”) whereby the rest of the site is
written in English.
2) “awaiting” is a word that
expects a subsequent subject. In the title “
3) In the last minute offers, the first sentence is formulated as kind
of a slogan. This is a little ill suited as one expects more something like a
description (with entire sentences). For the second sentence, they talk about a
“flight+hotel trip”. This is an unnatural
combination as usually a trip already includes one or both of these elements
(flight and hotel).
Explain
your solutions to resolve these consistency issues.
1) If there is not a particular reason, a site should only be written in
one language. If you want to have more than one language, you should have a
button to change the language of the whole site. So “offre
du jour” could be translated into “today’s
offers” and “plan du site” into “Site map”.
2) “Island adventure awaits” could be replaced with “
3) We chose to use “get away for less money!” which is an
entire sentence as first and “find great low rates for flight and hotel
packages” for the second. The word package fits better into the context
than the word trip. However, also “find great low rates for your
trip” is possible.
Typography
(weight: 7/40)
Give
some arguments for what might be problematic with the typography?
-
The font changes very often in the
site:
o
Within the menu, the font for the
login and password is different from the rest, also the size changes.
o
The Offres
du jour have a different size than the menu, even
though they are both the titles of their part of the site.
o
The title looks almost as small as
the offres du jour.
-
On the right side, there is not really a
structure to distinguish titles and content. 3 of the 4 blocks start with a red
title, one is underlined, the other two aren’t.
The fourth block even starts just with content-text. Also, some of the (judged
important) content text is colored red and bold or underlined, the same as the
titles.
This makes it very difficult for the user to decide where to start reading
– the blocks itself don’t attract as much attention as they would
if there was always a short title clearly distinguishable from the rest.
-
If one is interested in a certain
offer, there is not always a clear way to get to the details page. Usually, a
text-link on a webpage is indicated by underlining the text. There is no other
indication of text being a link, so if this is not consistently made, the user
will have difficulties to find what he searches.
o
In the first block, the title is
underlined (and therefore the link?).
o
In the second block, nothing is
underlined à
is this link entirely missing, or should the user try to click on some red or
black text?
o
In the third block, the underlined
part is at the bottom – and corresponds probably even to the title of
that block. Its color is red, but it is underlined black instead of red as the
other links.
o
In the fourth block, the underlined
part is also at the bottom. Again, if it is a link, it looks quite different to
the ones from the first and third block.
What
would you do differently?
-
We used the same font and size for
the login as for the rest of the menu. The titles are italic, the subtitles
aren’t. Today’s offers and Menu have the same size, and Born to
Travel has clearly a bigger size than the rest.
-
The typography of the right part
with today’s offers is applied in a more consistent way.
o
We only used red to emphasize the
prize (like an advertisement – should attract the user to click on the
link) and the 4 stars of the hotel.
o
The single blocks are clearly
separated by having a big title for each of them.
-
The links to the single offers are all
indicated by the underlined text: “Learn more…” and located
at the end of the description. So they can easily be found by an interested
user.
Our redesigned version:
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