Hi. I’m glad you wrote back. Please understand that I like Southwest. I fly your airline frequently, particularly between Los Angeles and San Francisco or Oakland and Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

If I didn’t use Southwest so often I probably wouldn’t be so acutely aware of the deficiencies in the site design as it relates to buying a ticket online. That said, I ALWAYS wonder what your developers were thinking when I use the site.

That’s because there are so many problems with the purchasing process that I literally grit my teeth in frustration every time I use it. This is especially true if I’m ever in a hurry and doubly true if I’m trying to complete a transaction using anything other than a full fledged computer (vs. Say an iPhone or Nokia N810 or N95 Smartphone).

First I have to ask, why doesn’t Southwest let me store a profile so that I don’t have to fill out every single field every single time? I mean even if you didn’t want the responsibility of storing credit card information you could still store my preferences including my name, address, phone number, etc.

You already have this information for all your frequent flyers anyway so why not make it possible to log into the site using your SWA FF# and have that automatically populate the rest of the data for us? That in and of itself would probably save people five to ten minutes (and hair pulling frustration) each and every time they buy a ticket.

You could even let people choose to save their most frequently used routes so that logging in could instantiate some logic that lets a person choose the days of their flight and click “fly my regular route” and that would be enough to bring up the options available for the day the visitor specifies.

Choosing dates and times would lead to a second dialog. Payment. If you’re storing credit card information then a drop down dialog would allow the user to select which card he or she wished to use - a secondary confirmation such as requesting the CCV # from the card or the last 4 digits of the primary cardholder’s social security # could be used.

This would be a vast improvement over the current workflow.

Even if there was some reason why Southwest didn’t want to enable this sort of functionality (although I find it hard to imagine why not considering most other airlines do this), the current site could be dramatically improved.

First, yours is the only company I’ve ever encountered where the data in the dialog box requesting the credit card number persists when the user has the auto-fill feature enabled on Firefox. In case you don’t know what I mean, this feature automatically completes entries when the user enters the first digit or letter or uses the down arrow to see the full list.

The problem with your site is that most auto-fill information is not persistent, however the credit card number is. This defeats most security for the users and makes Southwest look stupid since my email address has to be entered each time but my CC# is there for anyone’s abuse.

What should happen is that with the exception of the CC# all the information should persist, especially if the user makes an error and has to back up a screen so that only the field that needs to be corrected must be changed instead of forcing the user to re-enter all the data a second time and risk missing something else.

Also, it is ridiculous that some fields would cause the process to error out in the first place. Who cares if my salutation is there or not? (this is an exaggeration but you require some fields to be completed (such as whether my number is home or office) that are so totally trivial that it is mind-numbing that it is required at all, let alone that my transaction could fail for want of selecting such a radio button in the first place.

At any rate, I’m glad you’ve taken the time to consider my recommendations. If you do decide to improve upon your current site I would be pleased to be considered for usability testing as it is probably obvious that I have given this issue some thought.

While I don’t do site development myself, if you need a recommendation, I am well known in the Silicon Valley and Los Angeles technology communities and could make a recommendation if you need one.

Sincerely,

Oliver Starr, Editor
GTDtimes.com
And
OWStarr.com

Paula Berg
Southwest Airlines