Porter Airlines Check In Website

    This past weekend I flew to Boston. I've done this many times, yet this time I experienced one of the most frustrating user experiences in a long time. This occurred when I was checking in on  the porter airlines website.

    I went through the various check in pages carefully inputting my information. To my surprise, on the very last page when I clicked the check in button I got the following message. "On-line check in not available for passenger (my name inserted here)." Initially I thought maybe there was an issue with their server and I tried again later. However, I got the same message again. At this point I had already spent 20 min trying to check in so I gave up. 

    Come the day of the flight, when I got to the airport it turns out I was randomly selected for additional security screening. Now, that wasn't an issue but the least they could do is give you the message at the start of your on-line check in. Not when you've completed the forms and are trying to submit it. They should also re-word the message as it is so vague that it only causes confusion.

    Overall, they need to redesign this feature of their on-line check in as it is a really poor experience for a passenger. The majority of online check in services such as my family doctor's website indicate whether or not you can check in at the very beginning of the process. So such a design change has no downsides and porter airlines has no reason to have such a design. It's such a simple and intuitive design aspect.

    To conclude, the lesson here is design the interface to be as easy and straightforward for the user as possible. Do not cut corners. Note, I have not included images of this interface issue as the page contains sensitive data. Also, I have not seen this porter airlines issue raised anywhere in my web search.

The Lenovo Y50 Touch

    To the left you see part of my two year old Lenovo Y50 Touch. Overall, it is a great laptop, however there is a key design flaw. In the top of the image is the screen. If you look lower, right below the screen but before the hinge that connects the bottom half of the laptop you will see a plastic component. In my picture, there is also a piece of tape.
    Essentially, the piece of plastic is held by a 1 mm hook. The problem is the hook wears down, failing to hold the plastic component. Then when you go to open up the laptop, the plastic component gets caught on the corner of the bottom half of the laptop. This in turn pulls on a component called the touch digitizer and cracks it. To add to the trouble, the touch digitizer component is glued to the screen. In other words, when one needs to be replaced, so those the other.
    It's like a domino effect and all because of a 1 mm component hook. This hardware design has led to a horrible user experience. Due to the crack in the digitizer, the screen blacks out whenever it is moved. This limits usability greatly. The only way to see the screen again is to restart the computer. The user experience implications are huge. In order to fix it, the replacement of the screen and digitizer costs approximately $500. To put this into perspective, the laptop originally cost $1000.
    Whether this design flaw was intentional or not, it certainly does not bode well for Lenovo. The fact of the matter is they could have avoided all of this had they made a stronger component. A stronger component would have added minimal cost to the total as well. To conclude, the laptop is an awesome laptop with the hook intact. But once it wears thin, it will cause so much frustration.

 The IOS 10 Interface

     On the left is a picture of the IOS 10 Interface. At a first glance, the interface is sleek, instructions to proceed are provided, and it gives the user a good feeling. However, being an phone user myself, I have come across a design feature that is extremely frustrating. Essentially, the default process of unlocking an IPhone is to press the home button which brings you to the lock screen and then press the home button again to get to the home screen.

    This action may not seem like a big deal, however earlier versions of the IOS would not require you to press the home button twice. Instead they would bring you to the home screen the first time. So, it's as if the IOS took a step back when it added this extra action. It requires more work from the user for the same result. This aspect of the IOS hurts the user experience given how frequently a user needs to open their phone to the home screen.

    Apple's motivation for adding this extra step is as follows; by adding the extra button push, the IOS can verify if you have privilege to get into the device by fingerprint touch. Then the applications accessible from the lock screen can gain access to encrypted data. So if you want to look at your camera roll from the lock screen you can given that your fingerprint has been verified. This encrypted data access at the lock screen is a cool feature but it does not outweigh the frustration from needing to push the home button twice to get to the home screen. The reason being, the only current applications that access encrypted data from the lock screen are the camera and notification centre. The feature, while having potential, is not used nearly as much as it should to make up for the negative user experience. If anything, Apple should not have made the feature as the default option. The feature is too early for it's time, and is a real nuisance.
    Until more applications can have lock screen interfaces to access encrypted data, myself and many other users who I have talked to about this design aspect have chosen to turn off the feature. Nonetheless, even finding out how to turn the feature off was quite a pain and required searching the web.