Part of the Process

Recently I have been doing some spring cleaning and unsubscribe from various newsletters that I've collected over the past year. One thing that has struck me is the very different user experiences that you get from such a simple task. So I thought I'd quickly run through the good, the bad and the ugly ... London Gatwick airport's page says a simple "your request has been processed", what does this mean? how are my expectations being managed? (they aren't). Which newsletter was this again? Oops, how do I sign back up I didn't mean to click on that! This page looks particularly lazy, possibly not even a web page with any formatting. What makes this worse is that it is from a third party mail list management service ... it doesn't look like the whole user journey is considered equally. Next up was Sweatshop with the confusing "been taken into account" ... 5 days later I was still receiving emails. That is a minor irritation but it cr...

Some notes from this quarter's technology briefing from Thoughtworks. This session's topic was "Big Data". I was pleased that the topic was chosen as I am interest in Big Data and travel , especially how it can be used by my clients and to enhance the product that I work on. Caitlin McDonald from twitter has also created a Storify story from tweets during the event (with the added bonus is that I am in the background to someone's photo) Session The main speaker was David Elliman with Ashok Subramanian - David has also written a blog post called The Big in Big Data Misses the Point that presents some of the content covered or see the full presentation in English or German . The session started y looking at the origin of "information explosion" and how in the 1940s people were starting to get worried about the miles of shelf space would be needed by 2000 to store all the books produced. This was contrasted with the explosion of multimedia informat...

It's been a couple of weeks now but I thought I'd share some thoughts from this year's SITA Air Transport IT Summit 2014. From my personal perspective the interesting bits were around mobile and passenger communications. From the SITA survey results it looks like everything going self-service, with kiosks due to make a resurgence as a more intelligent touch point than the current check-in and boarding pass generators. A key target for investment over the next 3 years is predicted to be baggage services, which was good to hear since that's what we'd thought at 15below towers in creating our customer conference presentations. Given the infrastructure changes over the past few years I'm quite excited about how the passenger experience can be improved in this area - having had to wait 16hours for my bag to turn up with minimal contact or updates I would certainly appreciate that! After baggage, disruption management will be next, which does surprise me a bit...