Design vs Art Blog

Recently I was booking some flights and had to use British Airways and Lufthansa systems. Making a comparison between the two airlines is inevitable as they developed very different solutions.

The beginning is pretty similar on both sites, you will have to enter departure and destination airports and dates. Then you get to the flight selection.

British Airways
The BA site will display available flight dates and prices in two tables, one above the other. This approach is fine, but in my opinion the tables are two big and contain two little information, the comparison between them is a little bit difficult.

Really bad 1: when you choose another flight, a message with a funny animation will be displayed informing that the price will be updated, but after waiting a while nothing changes… What is this?!

Really bad 2: There is a link to a Currency Calculator. This is not going to change the site’s currency, but it will pop up another window with a currency calculator. So the user has to do this every time she wants to see the prices in another currency different from GB Pounds.

Lufthansa
I could not hide my happiness when I saw the design presented by Lufthansa for its booking system, not even Expedia has something like this. The site displays a table combining the departure and return flight dates where the desired flight is marked. Changing selection is fast and easy. It is also very nice from Lufthansa to mark in yellow the lowest prices. Fantastic.

Click to enlarge

Conclusion
I would not say that the British Airways site is bad, but Lufthansa found a much better design for its online booking service.

Popularity: 23% [?]

I think I am lucky for having an annual public transport ticket for the Munich area (Bavaria, Germany). For me it was easy, I went to the city transport company office (MVG, Münchner Verkehrsgesellschaft mbH) and I told the friendly lady the most obvious thing I could: I live here, and I work there, I would like an annual ticket for that. Simple.

Unfortunately, MVG took a completely different approach while designing its ticket machines. Just as you can imagine it in your worst nightmares, the machine is full of numbers, zones, buttons, a small screen, etc., etc…

Lets have a closer look…
Imagine that you have the bad-luck of having to buy a ticket with this machine, where would you look at first? The screen is too far from the buttons and there are two different groups of buttons labeled with numbers (numbers 1 to 4 appear twice). It’s nice that you can select 6 different languages, but zone information and almost all button labels are only in German.

Here you have 28 buttons! You get them in orange, blue, yellow, red, green, with and without stripes. They did one good thing putting a sticker indicating the buttons to buy tickets for tourist, good point.

This is the most crazy part of this devilish machine, checking which zone ticket you should buy could be a whole mission. Please don’t ask me to tell you how this works, nobody knows.

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Solution
Why don’t we reduce all this mess to the most simple and obvious solution? The machine should know where is located, so the only thing to do would be to push the destination station on the map! I want to go form here to there, that’s it!

I have to say that I totally love the Munich public transport, it’s just fantastic, but the price system and the ticket machines are horrible. There is something to improve there…

Popularity: 18% [?]