When Design Fails: United Flunks The Test

I'm going to Worldcon this year. Their official airline is United, so I tried to book at their site.

It's clear that nobody actually designed their reservation system. I would bet that they copied bits of it from other people's systems without ever having someone sit down and test it or even think it through.

Let me show you one reason I think so:


I live in the New York area. I can conveniently fly from any of four airports: Islip, LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark. Naturally I would like to check all those airports for the best price. For no good reason, United decided to force me to pick only one airport at a time to check rates. (Note the round "radio buttons" for each airport, which limit you to a single choice.)

A well-thought-out system would let me pick any number of airports and check them all in a single operation. That's what computers are good at, right? Doing repetitive work so us humans don't have to?

I tried to suggest this to United directly, but their web site has no way to send feedback.

After I gave up and tried to check one airport at a time, I discovered that the Select button didn't actually work (on Mozilla Firefox). Another stupid interface problem: to select cities whose names start with "I" one must click on a one pixel wide sans-serif letter. One pixel.

Thanks, United, for making me resent the very idea of buying tickets from you.

If any United employee reads this, I'd be grateful if you'd report this problem to your management, since they seemingly have a corporate policy of ignoring their customers.