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A moment later, the mocking message slides up and away, and the top nav has been replaced by mostly broken status bar.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.
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.
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.
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.