The last couple of weeks have been a stressful time for the team and me. Everybody was working towards the launch of the first international server and basically put aside most other tasks that need to be taken care of. Now that it has been 3 days since the extremely smooth start of Nicosia we finally find the time to take a look at other things again. The first thing that came to my mind on monday was usability. A friend of mine who had never played AirlineSim before took a brief look at the game and his first impression was that it was extremely difficult for a new player to find his way into the game. It’s simple things that make it difficult: realizing that you need to have an airline to open a branch office, knowing that your airline request has to be screened by a member of our support team, entering the correct airport codes when requesting it and getting the correct error message if you don’t. Most of these issues are mentioned somewhere in the tutorial or in the game itself, some aren’t. Either way, all these tiny issues make it difficult to get started quickly and easily and might scare off any new player who’s not a die-hard aviation geek.
When looking at the game from a newbie’s perspective you notice the same pattern everywhere around the game: Many features are tailored to the needs of enthusiastic AirlineSim fans who accept the game the way it is while other parts of the interface were put in by us developers once and then left in a “it does what it’s supposed to” state irrespective of any usability flaws. I noticed these shortcomings myself when I finally got around launching a new airline on Nicosia again…a first in a long time for me.
That’s why I proclaimed the coming days to be usability week! There’s need for quite a bit of fixing and the first area to get a major brush-up is the flight number and route management. I’ve noticed that, when scheduling new flights and working on flight plans, it’s sometimes very cumbersome to switch between the relevant pages and to get to the information you need quickly. Therefore I’ve redone the flight number and routes page respectively. Both got a common header featuring an easy-to-use route selector and all basic information and links regarding the route in question. Below that are the tools and tables that have been there eversince. I cleaned up the arrangement to make it more compact, added a few additional information requested by users on the forums and I streamlined some of the operations. For example, you can now change a flight’s or route’s prices and service profiles in one go and you get a well visible status information that the operation was successful, some detail AirlineSim is lacking in far too many parts of the game. Overall it’s now far easier to switch between flights, routes and assigned aircraft. Find some screens of the new interface below and let me know what you think.
Next on my list are some more links to important related pages during the flight planning process and an easier entry into the game featuring better feedback to the player and a clearer interface which is easy to understand even without having read the manual (although you always should, of course 
). As all these changes are not “critical” I might ignore our usual patchday cycle and update the servers whenever I feel I’m done.
Maybe it’s worth mentioning one of the reasons for the fact that such important things are often neglected during development: It’s tough to imagine for an outsider what amount of work needs to be put into details like this. Overhauling the flight number and route pages took me almost a full day of work time and there are probably still many glitches that need to be found and fixed. This is partly due to the circumstance that the framework currently used for AirlineSim is somewhat out of date which makes it more and more diffcult to deliver the kind of user experience one is used to from modern web pages. The technological base of our next major version, i.e. AirlineSim 1.4, will make this part of development far easier and faster.
[...] said I should blog about what Im doing…so I did: http://en.airlinesim.aero/portal/?p=73 [...]
First of all: WOW! The layout looks very nice, clean and more logically grouped than now. I mostly like the feature of opening the flight number management in tabs.
Though, I would have some minor suggestions for this page.
Why not move the “Switch to opposite route” link into another tab simply called “Opposite Route/Direction”? The content could be either preloaded and shown/hidden by switching tabs or the tab itself could stay a link opening the appropriate page.
Personally, I’m no big fan of select boxes (dropdowns). This is not visible on the screens but could the list with links to other destinations from this airport remain at the bottom of the page? Clicking on a link is much more convienent than expanding a select box and then navigate to the desired value… but maybe that’s just me
And a last thing, which may not have anything to do with this, so just out of the blue. Maybe there could be an easy way of creating a new flight number for this route (and opposite direction optionally) by either providing the new numbers yourself or even better, being provided the next highest and available flight number based on the already assigned ones for this route.
Anyhow, keep up the great work! I’m very much looking forward to your changes!
Thanks for your comment planespotter.
I think the “switch to opposite route” is a link to another page while tabs refer to the content of the current page. Therefore making this link a tap would confusing or at least logically incorrect.
Also I know that drop-downs aren’t everyones favourite, but the do have some advantages over regular links. First of all the require less space, which is on of the primary reasons I employed them in this case. Also they are form components which means that the can easily be ued by keyboard. Tab to the drop-down, enter the first letters of the airport and you’re done. I assigned tab indices to the drop-downs so this will work even faster. You can’t do this by using lists of links.
Concerning your “create flight number” proposal: I’ve thouht about this as well and I’ll look into how this could be put in.
Martin, thanks for the reply.
Of course tabs shouldn’t necessarily be links. But in this case, the information of both sites would be in the same place. When going through route data, I’m most likely will have my mouse in this region any way, so clicking a tab in a defined area close to it would be easier and would make up for the unlogical use of a tab, imho.
As to the drop-downs, keep in mind that not all browsers support multi-character input on them in order to access the values. As soon as there are more destinations with the same initial letter, some will have to open it up with the mouse or use the arrow keys to navigate through them. Same applies to destinations with more than one airport for the same city like London or Bangkok, they share a pretty “long” common name before they are distinguishable. Also, not every user is used to employing his mouse and keyboard at the same time to access content.
Another thing, as I cannot see a submit button in the screens, I guess there is a onchange event attached to the select boxes. So when using the keyboard, I will have to hit return in order to tell my browser that I’ve made my decision, some browsers are even worse and require one to confirm by clicking with your mouse. This mixture is not very user-friendly for some, that’s why I suggested to go both ways and keep the links for those who appreciate them
Thanks for your time, I appreciate your efforts!