Now anyone who does not collect money is exempt, like Google Flights or Hipmunk, and they can design anything they want. But an airline or OTA that collects the money has to deal with the DOT and its insane rules and the paranoid lawyers.
I like the design though, very nice.
While what you say is correct, you can easily redesign UI and follow the rules.
A few years back, a designer blogged about a similar redesign for American Airlines. He was contacted by one of AA's in-house designers, who wrote about the internal politics and hurdles that get in the way of changing things. AA later sacked the designer for violating his NDA and the articles were deleted from the blog, but the entire episode was pretty interesting. If you're interested:
Copies of the Dustin Curtis & Mr. X posts http://www.flipthefunnelnow.com/dustin-curtis-%E2%80%93-dear...
Aftermath http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091106/0337536829.shtml
Even if a redesign doesn't touch any of the regulatory verbage and requirements, it still has to go through largely the same pipeline of internal approval as if it did. So even minor changes are viewed the same as significant ones.
Take the boarding pass. Given the limited amount of information present, redesigning them for a better experience should be a fucking no-brainer. No matter how long you search, I doubt you'll find anyone genuinely satisfied with their boarding pass. They're big, ugly, and reasonably unclear at a glance. You see tons of redesign experiments online, but no airline ever seems to take the hint or be inspired by them. Here's a semi-recent one that I love:
http://petesmart.co.uk/rethink-the-airline-boarding-pass/
Beautiful typography, perfectly sized for your passport, and easy to read at a glance. Throw in the time difference and predicted weather for your destination, and the redesign is utterly perfect. What's not to love? And yet, nothing.
I see two big problems with the status quo in that regard: first, you the almost reactionary mindsets that seem to become not only more common, but also even more reactionary, as a company grows. Self-deceptive thoughts like "change is scary/costly/will scare away all the customers" are pretty damned powerful. Along with a lack of genuine demand for the change in the first place: bad UI hurts customers and drives away sales, but quantifying it directly in a way that makes it a priority in itself is difficult. They're all the more powerful by the fact that they originally stem from genuine concerns. And these attitudes are practically everywhere. Hell, even apple.com took the better part of a decade to see a significant shift in its UI + design:
http://mac.appstorm.net/roundups/graphics-roundups/the-evolu...
It's really no wonder nothing changes. Until we start to see shifts in those attitudes, we're going to be largely stuck with the same bad UX in far too many places. :(
I can't find it now, but the AA designer's response discussed the challenges of re-designing these sites, would be appropriate to relate that here.
[1] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091106/0337536829.shtml
[2] https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2010/08/02/please-let-me-red...
2. Nathan, why would you design something in Photoshop instead of directly prototyping it in html/css? I think designing straight in html/css is already pretty fast.
You also run into the danger of adding some nice looking effects that are easy to add in Photoshop but not so easy to implement in CSS.
2. Because Photoshop is far faster and I create much more visually interesting designs when I use it.
Everything in the design is very easy to recreate with CSS. But I agree, sometimes it is better to design in the browser.
Your book on iOS design was, quite frankly, a waste of money. You touched the surface of interesting design topics and then never dived in. It's a lot harder to teach the principles of design and how to break down features into UI than it is to show pictures of successful designs. Your terminology for the standard controls in iOS was also incorrect.
You never went into why you design the way you do. By just putting up photoshop videos, you are able to deliver by not overselling what you have to offer. Please keep doing more photoshop videos.
United's current website is Continental's website pre-merger. It's the same design they've used for nearly eight years and it's really showing.
United's pre-merger site wasn't anything really spectacular, but it was still better than what they're putting up there now.
-retrocompatibility (the website has to work for the widest possible audience)
-legacy code (you can't waste tens of men-hours for something unproven and of dubious impact on your business. I mean, people have no problem booking flights with the current website)
-implementing in code a photoshop design presents its own challenges and would require a considerable investment of resources. Usually the result would be worse than what planned due to intrinsic limitations of web technologies
-even the smallest change has to be approved by a committee, this is a big corporate entity, not a startup. A radical redesign is likely out of discussion.
(and if you like it, read the whole article; it's fantastic).
All that aside, a photoshop comp 'redesign' (re-skin may be more accurate) without a brief or objectives besides 'make it easier to use/prettier' is not design. At best it's speculation, at a glance it's just a different layout, at worst it's a grab for traffic to your blog so you can sell more of books.
A design is a solution to a problem, if you don't start with a well defined problem you're not designing...
This course has a clear purpose: How can I photoshop to design UI?
There's no need to belittle people who actually create content to share.
