A few months ago I blogged about some changes that I felt WestJet could make to their site to give it better usability. As it turns out the Digital Team at WestJet was several steps ahead of me and had already been plotting a serious revamp since the beginning of the year. Rather than addressing the situation with band-aid fixes the team elected to do a comprehensive re-design including some deep technology changes to get the results they wanted. Today I was in Calgary for a preview of the new site and I really liked what I saw.
The new WestJet.com homepage
As you can see, the clutter of old has been replaced by a minimalist user interface. This makes perfect sense – while visitors go to WestJet.com for any number of reasons, the main reasons remain the same; to research and book travel, to check-in, and to check flight statuses. The new site ensures all of these needs have a corresponding user interface item that is clearly visible from the homepage. This was not at all the case with the previous site. What about the non-core functions you ask? Those needs are now easily addressed through a search box atop every page. This too is new – no search functionality existed on the last version of the site.
Logical grouping adds much needed information architecture
Beyond these key changes, a lot more utility has been packed into every pixel. Gone is the ghastly destinations drop-down list, replaced by a much more elegant textbox-based solution. In the same vein the site’s navigation mechanisms have been re-designed to offer a more intuitive browsing experience by grouping similar tasks and assets. In addition to this, user location information is used to display targeted messaging. This exercise in information architecture and composition was simply absent from the previous version of the site.
The new site has not only caught up, it is also positioned for the future. The impending re-launch was just one major milestone in a larger digital renewal project. Although exact timelines and deliverables remain abstract it’s clear that WestJet has really done its homework and recognized the need to accommodate more browsers and device types. Again, this makes perfect sense since every visit represents potential revenue; not making accommodations would be inexcusable!
For all of the individual changes – big and small – that have been implemented I think the site’s biggest win is in the feelings it invokes, or rather doesn’t invoke, in the user. The frustration, confusion and general sense of being overwhelmed are gone. The net result of all of this is that the upbeat, customer-friendly experience WestJet prides itself on, now starts at your computer terminal and not the airport terminal. This can only be a good thing.
