UX Fumble: Air Canada enRoute

Speaking of bad usability, take a look at Air Canada’s relatively new enRoute in-flight entertainment system.

This system is really cool because it lets you watch a whole bunch of movies and TV shows on-demand (when it works), but they’ve made some critical errors in its usability and user experience. Here we see the TV feature, that allows you to presumably watch a TV show of your choice.

So what went wrong? Well, the one thing they managed to successfully do here is bring the worst experience of watching TV to the new system. Who wants to navigate through sets of unnamed channels to see what they’re playing? And what happened to channels 1-3, 12, 14-18, and 21?

The way that these are organized and displayed are completely nonsensical. A list of shows organized by genre (and alphabetically) is all that is needed here. Presumably, the designers of this system think that people wouldn’t be able to understand such a mental model, but really, what they’ve done is just made this system more difficult to use. To see what shows are playing on each channel, I have to touch each one, then hit the back keep to return to the channel menu.

Apologies for the lousy photo quality; The iPhone isn’t renowned for its stellar camera.

The critical flaw here is that the shows are on-demand, completely eliminating any need for channels - the concept of a channel is only required where something is being broadcast, or streamed live. As you can (barely) see above, ‘Ch 4′ is in fact just the sports channel - so why not name it that?

When you give the user more control over how to watch their content (being able to play/pause/rewind/skip video), there’s no need to restrict or cripple the way in which they can navigate amongst the content.

February 9, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized