Simplicity Drives Better Interaction

Ah so Gerry McGovern went back to topics I like this week. His focus was on the customer as a stranger and how to deal with them.

And this is where I think we need to do a lot more than we are today. If any of you have used the wayback machine you will know how useful it can be to look at the progression of different websites. One of my colleagues Professor David uses it a lot to illustrate the growth of websites. His specific example is to look at Expedia and as it went through each major home page redesign.

At each redesign the site gets to be lovely and clean and then slowly gets junked up with silly crud. Of course I am picking on Expedia but it applies to almost any site. Even my favorite "clean" site ClearTrip has developed some of this crud creep.

The argument is used that this Crud Creep is driven by the commercial needs of the site management. But Gerry's argument is that actually you can get better commercials by improving and simplifying the UE (User Experience).

He sites some great examples but sadly none in travel. And this is where I think we are just about ripe for a new wave of travel search and shopping sites with better interfaces. I still hanker for that Natural Search solution that does the heavy lifting for me.

I will continue to pursue this

Cheers