Posts Tagged website

Google’s Flight Information: Wild Guesses, not Actual Data

Posted by jasonwong in bad design, data visualization on December 28th, 2009

Google is useful for all kinds of things: certain information typed in a search box will bring up the information automatically. For example, “weather 02841″ will bring up the weather for the Newport, RI zip code. Additionally, typing in “UA 628″ or “DL 1064″ will bring up flight information for the United Airlines or Delta Airlines flight. One issue with this, though. The site that Google uses to pull up flight times in flightstats.com, which is not ideal for this task.

Let me explain with a concrete example. I was flying back from San Francisco to Providence on Saturday, December 19: the day of record snow (20 inches) in Washington, DC due to a blizzard all up and down the East Coast. Thankfully, I was routed through Atlanta (no snow), but things were messy enough that day that I was worried about being late.

My flight was to leave at 6 AM from San Francisco, but we hadn’t boarded at 5:45 AM yet. The gate said no change, but putting “DL 1064″ into Google brought up these results:

Delayed by 3 hours?! Instead of leaving at 6 AM, we’re leaving at 9 AM?! What? And then I noticed the words “ESTIMATED DEPARTURE” and decided to pull up the Delta site. Sorry for the poor resolution:

However, you can kind of squint and see that the flight was scheduled for an “ON TIME” departure. Turns out that we left maybe 15 minutes late.

The lesson here? The information that Google usually pulls up can be trusted. It’s flight information cannot, because it pulls Estimated Times from flightstats.com instead of current data. In this case, Google has failed to anticipate the information users want (actual data, not wild guesses), and that makes this a human factors error.

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Federal Benefits Website: Basic human factors error

Posted by jasonwong in perception on June 29th, 2009

FEDVIP is the Federal Employees Dental and Vision Insurance Program, and there is an online signup form. You sign up for Vision and Dental separately, and here is the status page that I got after signing up for a Vision plan:

fedvip

I am Not Enrolled in dental, and this is in red. Red is the generally symbolic of something negative, and Not Enrolled could certainly be considered Not Enrolled.

However, I Am Enrolled in vision, and even though the message is “I am Enrolled” – a positive thing – this text is still in red. It should definitely be in green.

The major issue is that someone could log on to check their enrollment status and think that, by seeing two red lines, something is in error. But it’s not, and it’s a moment of minor panic that can certainly be avoided.

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