Just returned from NYC on a flight from Song, the ill-fated Delta airlines experiment. Without much explanation Delta recently announced Song would be dismantled and its flights would become Delta air routes.

What follows is an experience designer’s critique of flying with Song.

• Personality as experience. From the moment I sat in the waiting area for my outbound flight, I noticed a difference. The brand colors were not a combination of blue, red and white (colors used by almost every major airline) but an off-green. The waiting area displays had sarcastic jokes in them. And the overhead announcements were entertaining and made me want to smile at the staff ( a rare feeling for frequent travelers). This was reflected on the plane: the safety announcements were sung, not spoken, and the song changed every day. A personality for the ariline was chosen and manifested it in the design of everything, and in the choice and rewards for all staff (Begging the question: if your software/website was a person, who would it be? Who would you want it to be? How will you get it closer?)
• Love vs. Annoyance . The risk of having a strong personality (or an experience) is that it’s subjective. In order to make something person A loves, you will always make something person B hates. Most brands chicken out and pick things that A and B accept, but don’t love. Assuming your target market has more of A than B, you’re ok. With Song, at first I thought I was a B. When onboard I was miffed at first by the relentlessly happy, cool vibe present in the onboard staff and all the materials (the safety warnings are done in song, and acted out by the air crew). But over the course of the flight, and the return trip I enjoyed it. I was being served by likeable real people, not robots. It was one of the most enjoyable flights I’ve had.
• Television is the flight opiate. I’m a reader. I bring 3 books when I fly. The TV screen on the back of the seat in front of me was an immediate annoyance and I turned it off. But when I caught my neighbors screen with the ESPN Classic channel on, my eyes lit up. I spent most of the flight watching classic football games and the discovery channel (one of 20 available). Never has a flight flown by so fast. A movie of my choice was available via credit card swipe for $5. The in-flight menu had above average food at reasonable (for airports) prices.
• The business confusion over style vs. experience. It’s not clear why Song was pulled: I haven’t found much analysis online other than reports of low ticket sales (but why?). Given the drops in experience quality across all airlines, and how unpleasant air travel can be for many, a service focused alternative (even at a price) seems a business opportunty. I fear that whatever the failures/mistakes were, good experience design will be lumped into the pile, and it will be some time before Delta, or anyone else invests in this way again.
• Growing brands vs. making them. One guess about why Song is being pulled is their approach to brand. Good brands take time to develop: you can’t always buy your way – you have to earn it. Given the backing of Delta they might have taken on the new brand with the goals of a billion dollar big player in mind, which can lead to marketing distractions (such as a Song store in NYC) over things with direct impact on the bottom line. There was real value in what they offered, but the emhpasis on style and presentation (The Song name, non-traditional colors, general sassyness) over substance (pleasant flights, decent food, high quality service) may have confused potential customers on what Song’s advantages really were.

References:

• Press release about the end of Song airlines.
• Old interview w/ Tim Maples, Song marketing director.
• Brand autopsy’s short critique of Song.

Which airline has the best overall experience? Why? (and if anyone finds other critiques or business commentary on Song, please comment).

Today marks the one year anniversary of pm-clinic, a friendly discussion group on leading and managing teams. It’s been a great success, growing to over 500 members but keeping a very high signal to noise ratio.

In the same spirit, I’m pleased to launch ux-clinic. Same basic structure and format, but different domain. We’ll be discussing common situations people who work on web, software UI and interaction design face.

All are welcome to join. I expect the list to be mostly usability engineers, web designers, managers, programmers, information architects and interaction designers, or people that play them on TV.

Over the next two weeks we’ll be self-organizing the list and then kick off the first weekly discussion in December.

So if you want to help shape a new community, join up now. Have questions? Comment here.

Sadly these critiques (in honor of world usability day) were delayed due to someone hacking the forums on my site. I’ll be getting to these queries over the next week as I recover some time.

Seattle Children’s Hospital

Summary: Nails the basics. It’s clear that most decisions made were done with care. The design has a clear audience in mind and carries through a consistent set of design concepts and elements, however there are some lapses and gaps here and there. Overall score: 7 out of 10 (just shy of an 8).

Core tasks:

• The good and the bad. It’s impossible to critique a design without some understanding of what it’s supposed to do, and who it’s for: especially a large site like this one. But this design does what good designs do: the front page tells me what the designer thinks the core tasks are. The right most column lists (what appear to be) some of the most frequent tasks people have. However, why are they on the right? The U.S. crowd reads left to right. Making this change breaks up the composition, so it doesn’t look great with my 5 second photoshop treatment, but that’s a direction I would go with (Among other things you’d have to change that arrow glyph to something else).
  
• Physician finder easy to use. I dug in here and poked around. Piece of cake. It was easy to pick a location and a specialization and get a list of docs. Search results pages were clean. My only gripe is that that no medical site in the universe has reviews from patients: referals being the most important thing for many parents in picking doctors.
• Donations and Gift shop. The interior leaf pages are nice and clean: easy to find my way and fill out the forms. The gift shop UI was good: I could pick gifts to send to guests. The only downside is that once inside the gift shop, the main navigation goes away. I have to hit the logo in the top left to return to the top: no other way to get back to the navigation (-5 points for that).
• What are the key needs? I spent some time in the health care advice and services sections, but if this were a critique for hire I’d be spend more time thinking about core/frequent behavior. There are clearly other core tasks worthy of exploration, but it’s time to move on.

Navigation:

• Mostly consistent hot track. Most navigation items, such as links and buttons hot track (mouseover) to white. But some don’t. The primary navigation at the top doesn’t have any mouseover behavior at all. This should be consistent. The impact is minor though: so many sites jumble up mouseover & link behavior that most people can figure it out.
• Tabs + breadcrumbs? I wasn’t sure the breadcrumbs were needed, given how clean and simple the tab navigation is. It seemed redundant, especially when pages had a graphic underneath the tabs.
• Section colors don’t unify the site. It’s clear that the colors for each sub-section of the site were chosen with care: they’re equally saturated tones. But the change between each subsite is strong enough that for a moment it feels like you’re gone to a different site altogether. Those colors should come through into the main navigation on the home page: either those are the colors for those sections or they’re not.
  
• Here’s a quick mock up of the main nav with consistent colors:
  

Aesthetics / Layout:

Linespacing and links can be cleaner. Although the color and style choices are good, there was some room for cleanup. First move was to make better use of the title space by moving Calendar and News to the top. Then, a rule: all headlines fit on one line. This always makes things easier to read. You can see in my tweaked version B it’s easier to skim. You could go further and experiment with moving the date into the link itself.
Other comments and nitpicks:

• Title is not the place for marketing. The site title is “World class pediatric health care from…”. Not good. This title string is what will appear in user’s bookmarks. It should be like a phone listing: terse. “Seattle Children’s hospital” is perfect.
• Title lengths. The titles grow on sub pages: even one level down they grow to more than 80 characters long. Who is going to read this? There’s no need to track the site hierarchy in the titles. All you need are two things: A short tile for the page and a short slug for the the site itself (and in that order).

In honor of world usability day, here’s an essay that examines the causes of bad designs, and offers advice on avoiding them.

Why ease of use doesn’t happen