Ryanair.com review

October 13, 2009 in All posts, review

Having just been sent a great link to Ryanair’s response to the recent Panorama documentary, I thought I’d not only share it with you all (since it is inflammatory, funny and has a nice tongue-in-cheek approach to the whole thing), but also take a close – more critical – look at the Ryanair site.  Panorama drew on the opinions of a web usability expert who, as far as I can see, has missed an opportunity.

So, predictably…

A review of www.ryanair.com

Ryanair are proud of the fact that they’re supposedly more popular than British Airways, and that their MD is “a kind and gentle, caring and thoughtful, sensitive and saintly human being widely beloved by all Ryanair’s 6,500 people and its 66m passengers”

Given that they’re so proud, how do you think their website will fare? Do you really have to ask? Read on!

First impressions:
Oh dear.

Design and layout:
I’m gonna jump straight into the guts of this rather than fannying about on the first impressions because, if you’ve just visited the site, you most likely have a headache.

Firstly, a few design guidelines to start us off:

• Lots of flashing, animated GIFs are completely unacceptable these days.
• When you have things to sell, work out which is the most important from a business perspective, and sell that first. It’s called hierarchy. Trying to sell everything all at once confuses the user.
• Comic Sans for a corporate font face makes the business look childish at best.
• Taking up huge amounts of space on your homepage with banners that take ages to play out their messages, and aren’t always relevant to why the user is visiting, is conversion-metric suicide.
• Structurally – how the pages and sections are built and referenced – this domain is a bombsite.
• Copyright 2008 Ryanair Ltd? We’re nearly in 2010!

There’s no consistency either – other than being consistently headache-inducing. All the tab designs are different; there’s numberous button designs;  the table designs are seriously crammed full of information and overload the user with data.

Further to this last point, the table design where the user selects which flight they want is very  busy and needs some serious work. Once a flight has been selected, it’s a bit of an eye-trek to find out where to go next. ‘Next week’? Oh no. ‘Select & continue’ is the next stage – but it’s the same weight and colour as ‘New search’. This is an absolutely key stage in the purchase journey, and giving people the opportunity to get something wrong and/or accidentally drop out of the journey entirely is a basic error.

Site layout needs work. The entire right-nav seems given over to flashing irritating graphics. How is this adding any value to anyone?

And since when does this icon mean ‘unaccompanied children’? To  be honest, the majority of the limited imagery on this site looks like it’s been created from the Wingdings font.

Structure:
As has been mentioned previously, the structure of this site is really not helping it at all. Nonsensical URLs like “/site/EN/inpage.php?partner=SKISITE&pos=HOME_SERVICES&culture=GB” mean absolutely nothing to anyone – either search engines or humans.

IA-wise, as already alluded, the site is also in need of a rethink. The actual groupings of products and services are not too badly thought-out…but the execution of where they sit and how they look is really not as good as it could be.

Final thoughts:
Ryanair, you are missing not only a trick, but an entire circus. This site could really serve the brand and your customers so much better.

The site needs a redesign by some experienced IA/user experience/web designer types. Yes, it’d be a costly exercise, but the gains that could potentially be reaped by doing so would be far greater. I would predict:

• Higher conversion rates
• Better brand presence on the web
• Better user experience

Let’s be honest: what better way to tell your valuable customers you love them by making it as easy as possible to take their money from them and get them on your planes?

Tags: design, panorama, review, ryanair, usability