Reservations about the usability of airline web sites

Abstract

Designing effective and usable web sites is important to survival in the e-commerce market. The focus of this study was to identify general usability issues on major airline web sites. Seven web sites were compared on the task of locating flight and fare information. Finding flight information across the web sites was a difficult task for many users in this study. Numerous usability issues were identified including problems with logon procedures, non-descriptive and redundant links, round-trip options, and unfamiliar technical language.