
The new VirginAmerica.com - malditojavi
http://static.virginamerica.com/Web3/newlookvx/vx-redesign-9/7/index.html
======
tommy_mcclung
Would have been great, except for it suffers from the same problem the
existing VA site suffers from. Almost every time I use the VA site, "something
goes wrong". I just tried to book tickets for next week, got all the way to
the end to pay, hit submit and "something went wrong". They just put a pretty
front end on a broken booking system that breaks almost every time I use the
site. The only thing I care about is that it works and the VA site
consistently fails, this upgrade doesn't fix the core problem I've always had
with it.

~~~
ecdavis
I've been very frustrated by this as well. I tried changing a booking with
Virgin Australia earlier today and got a popup message: "Important
information: an unknown error occurred. Try again."

------
malloreon
The new boarding pass design is fantastic. Every airline needs to do at least
that part immediately.

~~~
jperras
There was a post a few years ago that detailed many of the archaic and
somewhat obscure requirements that boarding passes must have:
[http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-
boarding-p...](http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-
pass-redesign)

It seems as though Virgin America can bypass many of these because there are
no (?) international flights.

The original boarding pass redesign post, to which the above was a rebuttal:
[http://passfail.squarespace.com/](http://passfail.squarespace.com/)

Edit: wrong links.

~~~
qqg3
No, they bypassed it because that is the print-at-home boarding pass design...

------
brryant
The scrolljacking really makes for a terrible UI/UX. Designers: why is this
something we're seeing more often? What is the main benefit?

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
Well we're seeing it more often in UI/UX because "forced creative vision" aka
"design dictatorship" is more popular and acceptable for designers these days.
Especially new designers who don't want to stick to the tried and true rules
of design (nor learn them), nor base their designs off of some kind of metrics
or best practices statistics. Steve Jobs culminated this attitude through his
"I'll tell the user what they want" philosophy.

~~~
kyleconrad
Clients drive design 99.9% of the time.

Clients like it because they think the cool kids are doing it.

Clients also like gimmicky scroll effects and parallax.

~~~
nfoz
> Clients drive design 99.9% of the time.

How does that happen?

~~~
kyleconrad
Because they're the ones hiring agencies, deciding mood and content based on
presented ideas, and then approving and revising design throughout the
process.

------
mfkp
I really don't like this new UI. Instead of having a sorted drop down, now
there's a bunch of boxes I have to look through to find the one I'm searching
for. Takes a lot longer than it used to.

Example: [http://cl.ly/image/3D0f2u0Y300Y](http://cl.ly/image/3D0f2u0Y300Y)

~~~
geuis
I disagree. I prefer the new bigger box UI. It took a mere moment to
understand everything is in alphabetical order, and scanning through them was
much quicker than trying to pick from a dropdown list.

~~~
dingaling
One advantage of a drop-down is that you can tab into the control and just
start typing the city name.

With this _mobile-first_ grid layout, there's no shortcut. You have to read
each and every entry and then haul the cursor over to select one.

------
zaroth
Someone else was wondering if this was a parody, I think they might be right.
There is so much funky with this, it does feel only half serious.

For me it started with 'Book from San Francisco'. I clicked on the 'Boston'
button, and it shows this weird top status-bar drop down thing which flashes
the message: 'Going to "Hahvahd," perchance?'. What?

Then the browser starts, a little bit too slowly, scrolling itself down
automatically... Off putting.

A moment later, the mocking message slides up and away, and the top nav has
been replaced by mostly broken status bar. Try clicking on some of those links
in the status bar if you want to get totally lost.

Then that calendar view... I mean, if it showed 'From $199...' or whatever
under each date, I could understand taking up so much space. I thought it was
a lot harder to find the right date this way than with their standard date
picker.

After picking a date, the flights table is significantly worse than their
current design. No way to step forward/backward in dates, no weekly overview,
super low contrast, overly spaced out, scroll down forever trying to see all
the flights, no sorting,...

Even the seat map is weird, I don't know if it's just due to the super-low
contrast, or the weird icons they put in place of seat numbers for the seats
which are taken, or maybe the weird way they show the pricing for each seating
area, but there was a lot of cognitive dissonance trying to understand what I
was looking at.

What it comes down to is an interface which was trying to make things simpler
actually introducing a huge amount of cognitive load where there didn't need
to be any.

In the end, I zoomed out to 33% to get a birds eye view and while it's
interesting to see everything on one page like that, I think they have a LOT
of work ahead of them making it actually flow properly, fixing the contrast
and layout, removing all the weird and distracting gimmicks, and bring back
some of the core functionality that's missing.

~~~
duderific
I think they took "mobile first" to the extreme, and disregarded desktop. I
imagine that giant calendar is pretty cool on an iPad. It's not really
responsive design if you optimize only for devices and not for desktop as
well.

~~~
gone35
Except it is just as awful, if not even worse, on Safari on iPad. At least for
me, scrolling is broken and it crashes constantly.

I honestly don't understand how website trends can _devolve_ so rapidly and
radically. This blunder may well end up costing them millions of dollars in
missed sales.

------
smackfu
It's very linear and seems to work well only if you have all the dates
completely locked down. I really prefer the designs that make it easy to see
if travelling a day earlier or later would be much cheaper. I think the other
Virgin sites do this.

------
vinceguidry
When I saw their new boarding pass I just had to laugh. Someone awhile back
went and redesigned Delta's boarding pass[1] and got a lot of crap over it for
not taking into account why the boarding pass was the way it was.[2][3] But
apparently someone at Virgin was taking notes.

[1] [http://passfail.squarespace.com/](http://passfail.squarespace.com/)

[2] [http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-
boarding-p...](http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding-
pass-redesign)

[3] [http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-
looks-...](http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-like/)

~~~
culturestate
There's a critical difference here; those redesigns are for boarding passes
issued at the airport, while Virgin's are printed at home. You can get away
with a lot when your common target equipment is an inkjet rather than a
thermal printer.

~~~
sdm
Why would you need to print them at all? Does Virgin not support electronic
boarding passes?

~~~
culturestate
There are still millions of people who don't have smartphones [1], for one.
I'd imagine that there's a nontrivial overlap between that group and people
who fly.

1\.
[https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/2/comS...](https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/2/comScore_Reports_December_2013_US_Smartphone_Subscriber_Market_Share)

------
qmr
This is horrible and broken. Real information replaced with "flat" design and
stupid hip made up words like "fun-erer".

    
    
      No javascript:  http://i.imgur.com/8HkKyZx.png
    

There is a delay of at least 100ms scrolling up and down between pages. I
would guess 150ms. I do not see any obvious way of changing this, and the
scroll bars are hidden. What if I need to change something at the top of the
page? I also managed to break scrolling ending up halfway between pages
somehow. The only way to fix this was to painfully scroll all the way to one
end to reset things.

    
    
      No CSS:  http://i.imgur.com/u5g0eaS.png
    

The site appears to scale horribly, and it looks like they are using
javascript to generate styles. IANA web developer and have not studied modern
web stuff in a long time, but this seems like A Bad Idea.

    
    
      No CSS or javascript:  http://i.imgur.com/Kb2JZAH.png
    

I do not even want to think about the accessibility issues.

All in all it seems like they are just following the flat design trend, for
the sake of following it. I am sure they have good intentions, but just from
analyzing this page I am underwhelmed.

~~~
nailer
Accessible browsers run Javascript, and have for some time. You may have a
point about CSS though.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
I'd argue the other way.

Accessible _websites_ are _usable_ without JS. Maybe not _pretty_ , but at
least _usable_.

~~~
nailer
I don't think you understood my comment.

------
jasonwen
This is super slick. Design wise it's ahead of its game, instead of another
flat design website.

I love how they put "life" into their brand with those avatars and make it fun
in this all too boring process of buying tickets. To be honest, I would be
jealous of how innovative Virgin is lately when I'm another airline.

UX wise there are some things I would do differently. There are some rough
edges but it's an iterative process and they'll probably track tons of things
now. For example, changing prior steps will reset the date selection.

Deep respect for their team, I also love their new logo. Awesome!

~~~
80
>Design wise it's ahead of its game, instead of another flat design website.

Huh - did we look at the same site? Just the same old minimal bootstrap3core
aesthetic that's everywhere nowadays. Found it pleasant to use, though.

~~~
jasonwen
With most flat design sites I have the feeling I've seen them before. With the
new Virgin site I don't have this feeling. Although it didn't work for you
haha.

Most flat design websites currently all use the same flat colors and the Flat
UI template.

Flat design websites that are created by excellent designers begin to use
gradients with specific color combinations. Like Stripe.

There's also an ongoing trend by using more thin fonts and thin graphs in
charts. Looks more elegant. I really like this, but UX wise I hear a lot of
signals that people find it hard to read.

------
mattangriffel
VirginAmerica, you can't brag about your site's responsive design and then
tell me I have to turn my phone to Portrait mode when I'm in Landscape.

------
rwc
Looks slick, but felt like the actual booking process was extraordinarily
disorienting. Too much movement and jumping around.

~~~
papa_bear
Agreed. Maybe it's better on a touchscreen than existing interfaces, but
changing the dates for my flight to check price difference was a huge pain.
I'll be sticking with google's flight search.

------
aneisf
I love this. The boarding pass design is a nice touch, although I still feel
like I'm going to fold it in a hurry to get it out of my hands and not in the
way they intend.

------
dc_ploy
It looks like I can't book a flight. "BUMMER. NO FLIGHTS ARE AVAILABLE FOR
THIS DATE. PLEASE TRY ANOTHER DATE." Am I supposed to keep clicking around
until I get something? Can I see a listing of "Available flights on the
calendar." I tried booking DCA to SAN.

------
kposehn
This is _slick_.

Virgin has been my favorite airline for some time, but now just went up 3.14
notches.

~~~
jksmith
Now if they could make some more money and expand to other airports.

------
Myrmornis
In terms of implementation, it's interesting that they chose ugly URLs which
encode _everything_

/book/rt/a1c1i1/sfo_bos/20140524_20140528

Note the a1c1i1: that's "1 Adult 1 Child 1 Infant" and it changes as you
adjust the widgets (without a page refresh).

Also, minor detail, but I'm interested to see that they use PUT as well as
POST to update the server with the selections. So that's following modern
"REST" guidelines (use verbs properly) but the URLs are anything but!

EDIT: I put "REST" in quotes to refer vaguely to modern API practices. I know
REST is strictly something else, please let's not talk about that it's really
boring.

~~~
alister
It's gotten to the point that whenever I want to post a URL in an article or
email a URL to someone, I need to sanitize it. I don't know what information I
might be leaking.

If the URL looks like it might have some hidden information, what I usually do
nowadays is to navigate to that location from a separate browser (in which I
have no passwords, logins, cookies, history), and cut and paste the URL from
there.

~~~
Myrmornis
> what I usually do nowadays is to navigate to that location from a separate
> browser (in which I have no passwords, logins, cookies, history)

incognito/porn mode should work for that too

------
tnorthcutt
1\. Click show more dates

2\. See more dates, but not enough

3\. Click show more dates

4\. See more dates, but not enough

5\. Click show more dates

6\. Nothing happens

7\. Click show more dates

8\. Nothing happens

9\. Give up

------
eevee
Fantastic.
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoYFJleIMAAmgMH.png:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoYFJleIMAAmgMH.png:large)

beta.virginamerica.com is, of course, a blank white void.

Filling out a form and clicking some buttons is such futuristic technology
that we can no longer figure out how to make it work without JavaScript.

~~~
spez
I don't know... maybe because it's 2014?

~~~
eevee
Oh, you're right. It should definitely be built in Shockwave Flash instead,
which is even newer and shinier than JavaScript.

~~~
nobotty
Flash as a technology is a caveman compared to modern Javascript-based
technologies. There is no audience that does not have JS enabled -- other than
the fringe who would probably be better off using wget to browse the internet.

~~~
eevee
We said exactly the same things about Flash not so many years ago, including
the pretentious dismissal of anyone who would dare not support the technology
we wanted to use. Before that (and to some extent even now) it was operating
systems: what kind of hippie doesn't run Windows, after all? It's pretty easy
to justify technical decisions by pigeonholing anyone not using our same
platform as The Kind Of People who we don't want giving us money anyway.

There are quite a few comments here complaining about the gaudy unusable
interface produced by "modern JavaScript-based techniques", which in this case
appear to provide virtually nothing that static HTML and CSS can't do. The dev
team was lazy and wanted to show off, and screw anyone who doesn't think
running gobs of arbitrary code should be a necessity for _buying a ticket_.

And for what it's worth my non-developer artist girlfriend has been using
noscript for longer than I have. I'll let her know what modern devs think of
her, though I don't think she's heard of wget.

------
jds375
Very well done. Beautiful and simple to use. Most importantly, everything is
kept on the same page and it loads quickly. I can't begin tell you how
frustrating it can be using something like Expedia or Continental and having
to wait so long for the next page to load.... Sometimes it takes too long and
I click 'back' and have to start the process all over (resubmit the form). By
keeping it on one page that expands downwards, it easy to tell when the next
widget is loading and prevents all of this from happening.

------
muxxa
This is really nice, but they haven't solved the following problem: sometimes
you need more information from further on in the process in order to choose
your dates. For some types of trip, the most important thing is a combination
of departure time and price; you want the lowest price as long as the
departure/arrival is within your acceptable range, and then you want to work
'backwards' to pick dates based on that. I don't know of any airline booking
process that accommodates that use-case well.

~~~
kevincrane
Hipmunk lets you search for flights with a certain date range and pick the
best flights from that, and there's also a "pricegraph" that sounds like it
does exactly what you want by showing you the cheapest prices within the next
90 days.

------
lechevalierd3on
I really hate scrolling hijacking...

~~~
instakill
You are not alone.

------
smrtinsert
This ui is ridiculous. It honestly feels like a parody.

------
stevenh
Cartoon characters everywhere? "cagillion"? "fun-erer"?

I'm not sure if the average customer will enjoy being treated as if they're
five years old. I find this unbearably corny and unprofessional.

~~~
madeofpalk
Seems to fit with their image, just like how they make fun of people who don't
know how seatbelts work in their pre-flight safety video.

I like it. It's fun and refreshing to see such an output from a 'giant'
corporation.

------
shalmanese
It's pretty but it's missing the one feature I love from the old site which is
to quickly scrub through dates to figure out if there's a cheaper flight
earlier or later than my planned date. My travel plans are usually somewhat
flexible so I'm often willing to shift by a day or two to save $100.

------
robertnealan
From a design perspective this is one of the most beautiful airline booking
designs I've ever seen, but from a usability perspective it might just be the
worst (save for maybe RyanAir).

The cities being laid out in a grid looks nice but is ultimately far more
difficult to understand then just looking at an alphabetical list in a
dropdown. Auto-picking your departure city based on your current location is
admittedly a nice detail, but it wasn't immediately obvious how I change where
I'm starting as the "link" was different than anything else on the page.

The "Who's Flying" section is massive for having so little real information.
And why are that the font is 120px (or 12rem) but the "+/-" controls are faded
out and tiny by comparison?

The calendar is again completely oversized, low contrast, and difficult to
understand. My laptop has a 1440x900 resolution screen and I can barely fit a
single full month in the window. If I happen to want to buy a ticket more than
a month or so in advance, I need to repeatedly click "More Dates" which then
appends another two months to the already crazy long page? Also, the low
contrast purple highlight for all the dates inbetween departure/return isn't
immediately noticeable.

When I click on a ticket price another window slides up over it - took a few
moments to figure out what actually happened there. Overall the "ticket
selection" again looks pretty, but when I can only see a few in the window at
any given time it's far less usable than a standard clean list. Also, the
"Continue" button looks identical to the other addon options, and it isn't
immediately obvious how to progress if you don't want to upgrade your ticket.

The seat selection admittedly is admittedly fun looking though why are half
the faces looking upset? Also, versions of the seat selection where they
actually place the seat INSIDE the plane in it's real physical location are
more readable than this abstracted version, though I do like how they clearly
broke it up into sections that show the different cabin/seat types. Again
though, I can only fit about half the plane on my screen at any given time.

Having the form adjacent to the seat selection is a nice touch as you can then
easily track who's sitting where as you enter their information (especially if
you're a family with kids), but for some reason they neglected to highlight
the seat on the visual map. Also, the form is again overly tall and I can only
fit about 2/3 of it at any time.

Overall I think it's a good start but hardly production ready. My gut instinct
is that most people will be impressed by how "pretty" it is, but that the
overall conversion rates will decrease significantly. The one really well done
idea is the fixed header, though realistically it should progressively fill
out with information and not show/hide ticket info at different stages in the
process (for instance, it did show my takeoff/landing times and price which
was extremely useful, but now hiding that to ask me who's sitting in seat 4B,
which is already emphasized at the top of the form).

~~~
alister
Having tried the new virginamerica.com site just now, I don't really see a big
difference between their site and anyone else's. Having booked through a lot
of different airline sites over the last 15 years, I want to say that the
differences between airline sites were much greater in the early web years.

All the airline sites seemed to have converged to a common model. They all
follow exactly the same flow: pick cities and dates, then pricing, then sign
in, etc. There was far greater variation in the flow in the early years.

> _but from a usability perspective it might just be the worst_

Oh, I can cite major airline websites that are _much_ worse from a usability
perspective. Trying to book a flight on any Brazilian airline is _impossible_
unless you're Brazilian. That's because every airline in Brazil has
inexplicably decided that they want you to enter your Brazilian identity
number -- explained in more detail here:

[http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Booking_a_domestic_fl...](http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Booking_a_domestic_flight_within_Brazil#Difficulties_of_airline_booking_for_visitors_to_Brazil)

If you're not Brazilian, you don't have such a number of course. Note that
this is not any sort of legal requirement; it's just thoughtlessness about
usability by the airlines.

I expect a lot of indignation this summer when visitors try to arrange flights
inside of Brazil during the World Cup.

~~~
tombot
"Trying to book a flight on any Brazilian airline is impossible unless you're
Brazilian"

I'm a UK citizen and recently booked and flew on an internal Brazilian flight.
I used my UK passport number in the slot for the Brazilian identity number,
there were no problems at all.

~~~
personlurking
There may have been updates to the airline sites due to the World Cup but the
sentiment many people have expressed as to the difficulty of getting a flight
as a foreigner is long-standing.

What airline did you use, btw?

------
rmason
I may be just an old curmudgeon but I will choose functional over pretty every
single time. By trying too hard to look hip it becomes a caricature of itself.

------
mrchess
Lost me at date picking, and then got even more confused when choosing
"flights" \-- incredibly hard to read the flight table.

Not a fan of this refresh.

------
Dorian-Marie
It's pretty but I think they need to do some user testing, booking flight is
actually harder:

* Choosing departure / arrival is hard

* Choosing the date is hard

* The "Continue" button is hidden

* I see avatars but I don't know what it means, and then I see that I can choose my avatar.

* ...

------
h1karu
When I clicked that I wanted to go from Austin TX to Portland, OR it said
"pack your plaid". This is just a poorly done rip-off of hipmonk's messaging.
It's just going to confuse people who aren't familiar with silly internet-meme
based stereotypes about whatever city it is they're choosing. It's just a bad
idea. Portland's message should have said something about roses, or Mount
hood, or even make reference to the fact that it rains a lot there, but not
some fuzzy stereotype about how a certain age group tend to dress.

------
orbitingpluto
I thought the option to select an avatar in the seating layout was an
interesting feature: so the gregarious can sit with the gregarious, the
droolers with the droolers, and the taciturn with the taciturn. Selecting a
female gender would probably guarantee you don't get an empty seat next to you
however...

But of course most of these booking sites actually hide pricing information
until you tell them exactly when and where you want to fly. You won't find out
that you can save some money by taking a two leg obscure routing or flying the
day before.

------
doctorfoo
Yet another "made for mobile" site. I hate these. Huge font sizes, massive
images, wide margins surrounding all elements, wasted space everywhere,
floating header obscuring the content. Ugh.

------
DigitalSea
As a developer myself, I've seen first hand this new trend of scroll-jacking,
parallax, animated, full-screen sections come in quicker than a rain storm. I
am just glad the whole horizontal layout thing isn't a thing any more,
horizontal sites were way worse in my opinion than this new trend of turning
websites into Powerpoint presentations.

I do like the aesthetic this new trend has, but accessibility wise, it's a no-
go. I feel bad for anyone with eyesight problems in particular who comes
across this site and has to read text on rainbow coloured backgrounds. These
kinds of sites are not very well accommodating to colour blind visitors and
that's no way to run a business.

Then there are screen height issues with the design. People on net-books and
iPad's in landscape orientation are probably not going to enjoy this site very
much as nothing really fits on the screen properly. The result is undeniably
beautiful though, and from an investor/board member perspective, I can
definitely feel the enthusiasm from here. This is the kind of site that gets
everyone on board, except the developers who have to build it (in most cases).

------
smrtinsert
This is good time to mention that scrolling is the bane of all things usable,
and the person who invented it should be shot. If I wanted to lose context of
my operations I would hire some guy to scream in my ear every few seconds, it
would be less annoying.

Scrolling uis clearly tailored to touch devices like this one really should be
an available alternative, not the only interface.

~~~
ethanbond
Wow. Are you kidding?

"Scrolling" is the bane of all things usable? Short of clicking on things,
scrolling is probably the single most familiar and universal interaction on
any computer of any form factor.

Not sure how scrolling necessitates loss of context nor how not-scrolling
maintains context. The two are causally unrelated.

~~~
carlitobklyn
I think he/she is referring to the fact that the site scrolls for you (i.e.
scroll hijacking), not the action of scrolling (by users).

When a site scrolls for you, it can cause you to lose context (as what you
just did is no longer on the page). I feel like a more apt term might be
slideshow design?

------
jrnkntl
Link to the new version:
[https://beta.virginamerica.com/](https://beta.virginamerica.com/)

------
state
Somewhat unrelated: I spent the majority of the day on a VA flight and I feel
like I'm still recovering from sitting under those colored lights. Really,
seriously, what is the benefit? At first I just felt nauseous, and after a
while it just turned in to a dull headache.

Usually air travel is great and productive, but that "club" lighting has got
to go.

------
jeroen
Something is broken. I get grey backgrounds and grey text when scrolling down.
Selecting text makes the correct colors show up. The background images further
down the site are missing.

After reloading the page, I now get text in the same color as the background.
And the down arrows are missing.

This all happens in Safari. WFM in Firefox and even in IE8 it degrades
acceptably.

------
coin
Sucks on iPad. There's a weird too fast scroll acceleration.

------
highwind
Why is the password limited to 16 characters long? I don't understand this
limitation on any of the sites.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
The password length should be limited to _something_. 16 characters is rather
short, though. (Still better than my old webmail, at exactly 6 characters,
only uppercase and numbers)

~~~
eevee
I don't see any reason to ever limit passwords to less than 100 characters.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Agreed.

------
mrmch
Just booked a flight I'd been putting off; the new experience is worlds better
than other airlines, though it still has its issues.

My favorite airline is still United; their website will let you get to the
final billing page, and submit your cc, only to find that "that flight isn't
available".

------
nailer
Tried to scroll down, nothing happened, then it scrolled way too far, then my
browser was unresponsive and I had to kill it. iPad, iOS 7.

Edit: tried a second time and slowed down my scrolling to get the site to
work. 'get Booking' doesn't work.

Like the folding boarding pass though.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
Lol. On my mobile out flashes between showing that yellow face an that laptop.
Absolutely zero usability. They could show fail or 404 as well. Customer
leaves the site in three seconds not even knowing or caring about what this
s@@t is.

------
madebymade
I think it looks nice, but find certain parts of the UX to be difficult /
confusing. I found selecting prices particularly confusing, was not sure where
i was supposed to be looking. Sure they will refine and iterate on it tho.

------
granttimmerman
Scrolling becomes is really buggy if you Cmd + f to search for something.

But overall, nice UI.

------
laoba
Just one quirk with the home page. Read down to the bottom, and then I tried
to scroll back up, and it would stop at each "Section" and would not let me
just continue scrolling up.

OSX Firefox 29.0.1

------
literalusername
I'm glad it's finally compatible with LastPass! That alone increases usability
quite a lot.

The cartoon characters strike me as misguided though. Their target demographic
is not children.

------
pkamb
Page Down key doesn't scroll.

------
utopkara
Best scrolling experience I've seen in sites like this. It might not be right
for all sites, but I would like to see it almost everywhere from now on.

~~~
mden
Why? I find it absolutely horrendous personally and would avoid any webpage
that used it (got to the end of the presentation on my second try as I
literally rage quit the first time).

Some reasons as to why I severely dislike it: 1) When it scrolls the
background changes color. There's multiple transitions going on. It's sort of
like going to a different website. I lose my entire concentration and
interest. 2) No scroll bar. I can't get to the final slide without painfully
going slide by slide. 3) When scrolling with the mouse, I lose control of the
webpage for about a second. I can keep spinning the mouse wheel but nothing is
happening. It's infuriating.

~~~
utopkara
I should have clarified what I meant by "sites like this". I was referring to
sites which have multiple pages that are presented as a scrollable single
page. Without a way to jump pages at proper page boundaries it becomes a pain
to read through them. I still hope that this becomes the norm for scrolling
through sites like this one.

------
0898
"Playful avatars", a "cheeky sense of humor". How is that a benefit to us?
It's like they left in copy from the agency pitch.

------
ericcholis
Just did a sample booking, and was very impressed. Some notes:

1) Some elements seem too far apart on a wider screen. Usual victim of
responsive design without a max width.

2) The loading between steps is damn snappy, but feels slow sometimes due to
the lack of an activity indicator. Slow is a relative term, but I instantly
felt like I had done something wrong or the page wasn't responding.

------
joedevon
The new site is not accessible unfortunately.

------
stephengoodwin
Everything looks great, until the "Get Booking" link didn't work on the final
slide (in Chrome on iPad)

~~~
ddw
Same here on a Nexus 5 with Chrome.

Oh the irony...

------
bmetz
Still can't change my login email ID.

------
11thEarlOfMar
Consider the alternative:

[http://www.united.com/](http://www.united.com/)

------
icpmacdo
What is the name of this new website design that is just one page that you
scroll through.

~~~
gone35
"Multi-page slideshow with vertical transitions", apparently[1].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7792585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7792585)

------
iaskwhy
Text doesn't look right in the latest stable Chrome/Windows 7.

------
lilpirate
Well, on stock Android browser, there's just a redirect loop.

------
benaston
Can anyone tell me the company(ies) that designed and implemented this
website? They seem to have negotiated a much freer hand with the client wrt
design than is typical.

------
archagon
On a meta note: it seems that design-related posts on HN tend to be pretty
controversial. Has there ever been a redesign posted here that garnered
universal praise?

------
patrickfl
I am really liking this design and HTML is so clean. Anyone know what the
breakdown of this stack is? A lot of the illustrations are SVG how are they
animated?

------
tericho
Late to the party but this is stunning. If any of the devs are reading this
I'd love to chat about your Angular implementation.

------
brianbreslin
Any idea how they are doing financially lately? I remember reading last fall
they were struggling financially.

------
josephjrobison
Looks sexy I dig it. Good use of Vine embedding, and the pocket pass is
something I would use.

------
ansimionescu
The boarding pass redesign reminded me of this (and my snarky side is
wondering whether they just stole some of the ideas):
[http://petesmart.co.uk/rethink-the-airline-boarding-
pass/](http://petesmart.co.uk/rethink-the-airline-boarding-pass/)

------
astletron
Worked terribly in Safari on iPhone 4s. No excuse for that at this late day.

------
jonn_g
Try the keyboard navigation

------
philk10
Bug Go to [https://beta.virginamerica.com/cms/fly-with-
us](https://beta.virginamerica.com/cms/fly-with-us) Scroll down, click on the
'learn more' underneath the Internet section - link is 'fpo'

Now, how do I report it? :)

------
verdi327
this site is beautiful. UX could be better but I don't understand why the
comments are so woefully negative. It's still very easy to book a flight

------
omilu
I appreciated the humor, and the cool colors helped.

------
mrcwinn
I think this is imperfect but pretty wonderful. Great job. Feel proud for all
the detail work you put into it, designers and engineers!

------
the_watcher
Pretty incredible how much better this is than every single competitor.

------
swalsh
I love that the default city is based on location.

~~~
smackfu
I'm in Connecticut and it defaults to Orlando instead of Boston.

Odd that other people are seeing a different default.

~~~
jrockway
I'm in New York and it defaulted to New York.

~~~
gdewilde
I'm in the Netherlands, it defaults to freezing the firefox.

------
patrickaljord
Pretty cool to see it's using AngularJS.

------
__matt
I should fly somewhere

------
vinhboy
Did anyone else notice the adult humour on the first slide. Ha! Well done.

------
sergiotapia
First thing I noticed is the san fransisco bridge and the gay community
rainbow.

