Ben Skelton's Blog

Yikes! Starwood launches a new website for W Hotels

I've decided that I'm going to take a mini-vacation in May and go to New York for nine days. Things have been über-busy at work, and I'd like to get to New York before it gets too hot.

I love W Hotels (have stayed at the San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago properties) and decided to check out their rates for New York in May. It appears that Starwood has recently launched a new website for the W brand and it is a total and utter gong show. It is likely the worst hotel site I have ever encountered for a brand of this size. I've only spent about ten minutes with the site, but I don't think I will be coming back...

A few things I noticed right away:

[1] The information architecture
The first time I tried to use the site I selected "W Destinations" and then "New York". If you select a destination you land on a "Where's Here" page. Huh? It isn't like W has hotels in obscure cities all over the world. Site visitors will likely know where New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seoul and Seattle are. After looking at the site in more detail it became obvious that I should have selected "W Hotels" as that would have produced a list of the actual properties...

In my experience people primarily visit a hotel site for three things — rates, deals and detailed hotel information (including large photographs). It might have been better for destination information to be integrated into the various hotel pages.

[2] Putting core information in pop-up windows
When you view the hotel details they appear in a tiny pop-up window. Huh? Why would you put your most important content in a little tiny window? Why wouldn't you take advantage of the fact that my laptop has a 15-inch screen? When you actually want to see more information you use a pull-down menu entitled "Explore More" which allows you to select a normal hotel page to view.

[3] The welcome agents are annoying
I thought the W experience was supposed to be wired, witty, welcoming and warm — not annoying and cheesy.

[4] The music is a neat idea but is executed poorly
Music is such a core part of the W experience that I think its use is justified on the site. That said, the player only plays thirty-seconds of each song and then jumps to the next one. I'm not previewing music in iTunes! If I was sitting in the living room of a W property and they were only playing thirty seconds of each song I would leave pretty quickly.

[5] Uhhhhh! Pulldowns over Flash are Bad
The pull down menus seem to conflict with the Flash movie on the homepage in Safari making them almost impossible to use. The help info says the site supports Safari, so I would assume that they would have done a decent job of QA'ing the site before launch.

[6] The date picker defaults to the end of 2008
Not sure why, but the date picker always goes to 12/31/2008 when you are using Safari. This doesn't happen across all Starwood properties (just some), so there must be an error in the way the picker is trying to capture the date from the browser.

[7] The comments box on the website
It is not large enough to document all the problems the site has :(

It surprises me that Starwood would get the Web experience so wrong, because they get the in-hotel experience so right. Both W and Westin are Wonderful (no pun intended), perhaps one day their online experience will be as well!

Sametime 7.5 Beta 3 Experiences

Lotus Sametime 7.5 beta 3 now posted
An updated beta of Sametime 7.5 has now been posted...UI has even more cleanup, and everything just feels a lot smoother than earlier betas.  Check it out.... (Thanks, Stu)

Ed Brill

I find this interesting. Habañero used to be a Lotus Notes shop a long time ago before we became a Microsoft partner and switched to Exchange. Notes did a lot of things right, but I remember thinking that the UI was probably one of the worst I had ever seen — the application was a nightmare to use and never felt like a true Windows application (yep, I used XP back then). Notes always felt that it had been designed to run the same way on every operating system (OS/2, Windows and MacOS). The UI did improve between versions, but switching to Outlook seemed like a huge improvement (from the end-user perspective).

The Lotus team has made a lot of noise about how they are cleaning up the UI and making both Notes and Sametime easier to use with a much larger focus on usability. They have also talked about true Macintosh support. I think this is great — the more competition MS has on corporate email solutions that support the Mac the better (Microsoft's Mac Exchange support through Entourage, although greatly improved, is still incredibly poor compared to Outlook).

I had seen some pretty sexy screen shots of Hannover (the next version of Notes) and Sametime, and decided to give beta 3 of Sametime a whirl on my Mac... Let's put it this way — Microsoft has nothing to worry about, even with their lackluster Microsoft Messenger and Exchange support on the Mac. Sametime is probably THE WORST Mac application I have used in a long time! Yes, I know it is beta, but give me a break — this thing looks like it was designed over a weekend by a team that had just gotten a Mac the week before... Alpha would probably be more appropriate.

So what's wrong with Sametime? Let's just look at one small example: how you install the application...

1. Download the Sametime application from IBM
   
2. The downloaded file has a .command extension. If you try clicking on the file you get an error message.
   
3. You need to go into your terminal and change the permissions on the file to make it executable (yay Unix commands!).
   
4. After that, the installer installs some bits on your computer (opens up the terminal and gives you a text status update), and places an install file in the /IBM/IBM Lotus Sametime Connect 7.5/ folder.
   
5. You then need to go to the folder listed above where you then can click on the .dmg file
6. You can then move the enclosed Sametime folder (with all its associated files) into your Applications directory.
   

This is how you generally install an application on the Mac:

1. Download the application
2. Double click the .DMG file.
   
3. Move (the one) application file into your applications folder.
   

Once you install the application there isn't much there. The UI is a bit of a mess, the application brings up another icon when you click on it on the Dock, meetings don't seem to work, etc, etc, etc.

Lets hope that the Notes / Sametime team actually manages to design a Macintosh version of Sametime and Notes that behave like a true Mac application, and not some strange port that doesn't have most of the neat features or provide any of the conventions used in the host OS... So far with what I have seen I'm not holding my breath!

 

Madonna.com: Hung up on usability

I noticed that Madonna has launched a redesigned website (www.madonna.com) to promote her new album. The site is an unusable mess, and got me thinking, can a usable site still be cool and edgy? One site that I think does a pretty good job is Urban Outfitters. Would love to hear of any others...

Usability Testing Drop-down Menus

One interesting item that keeps appearing in our usability testing sessions is that drop-down menus test quite well. Common sense (and Jakob Nielsen) would lead one to believe that drop-down menus should be avoided as the options within are not visible until users click the control.

I have found that users tend to gravitate towards drop-down menus in two cases:

1. They notice the title beside the drop-down menu and assume that the item they are looking for is in the drop-down control.
2. They are lost and start clicking on any drop-down to see if the item they are looking for is in the list.

One area that doesn't test as well on a lot of websites is the left-hand navigation. Once a website gets to the fifth-level of navigation (or beyond) the left-hand navigation tends to get pretty unruly and is hard to use and understand. At Habañero we have been working on navigation designs where we are using a classic left-hand navigation that include a drop-down menu to limit information overload while still keeping everything immediately accessible.

The first example where we tried this concept is on the MEC website. Once you click on a product category (eg. tents) you get the classic left-hand navigation for climbing gear, with a drop-down menu below the left-hand navigation which allows you to navigate to another area.

We have been working on a some new sites that take this concept, but integrate the drop-down menu with the left-hand menu in a more tightly-knit way. It will be interesting to see how this new navigation system will test...

Great VanUE Event

Wow - we had quite the turnout to the VanUE (Vancouver User Experience Group) event last night. 86 people signed in at the door! The group is really gaining some momentum which is awesome. It seems that the less academic (more real-world) events are the best attended. We also seem to get different people out to each event depending on the topic.

I thought that Selma Zafar from Nokia and Chris Masteron from Optimal Interfaces did a great job presenting. We do a lot of usability testing at Habañero and I still managed to pick up a few things from their presentation.

Unrelated to their presentation I also learned that Nokia has around 700 people that work in area. Who knew?