Youtravel.com is an accommodation-only startup offering online access to hotels and resorts around the Mediterranean and other worldwide destinations. Their intended customers are those who plan their own holiday or travel agents who put together holidays for their clients.

The site launched a little over a week ago with an early review posted to the Travolution blog. I agree with the comments posted, the site is not easy to use and will provide many users with a poor browsing experience.

For a business that depends on its website, accessible web content and user-centred design is good and essential business practice. According to government figures UK residents in 2003 made over 61 million trips abroad and spent over £28 billion.

A quick accessibility analysis of the home page indicates that the page does not comply with all of the automatic checkpoints for W3C Web Content Accessibility guidelines, the most basic accessibility test. The site does not produce valid HTML code and does not adhere to web standards.

The upshot of the site’s poor usability is that it is not accessible to a large market of potential customers, including the disabled. There are over 10 million disabled people in the UK. Many find it difficult to shop, find information and book holidays online because most websites are not accessible. The spending power of this is estimated to be in the region of £50 billion in the UK.

Good usability practice is not just for the disabled though – the usability problems evident will impact all users equally, regardless of ability.

Some of the issues include: insufficient contrast between foreground and background colours, text that is not scalable, lack of suitable alternative text for images and likely inconsistent display across a range of devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.

Colours
The first thought that struck me was the flat monochrome and poor use of colour. The colours are too dull and not consistent with the content theme of booking a holiday. The choice of colours for the background and foreground do not provide a high level of contrast for readability.

Fixed text size
For me the text is too small and too similar in size. Unfortunately, to increase the size for Internet Explorer users is not possible. The text in the corresponding style sheet has been attributed a fixed value and selecting a size from View > Text Size has no effect.

Printing
There is a lack of support for print friendly pages. Visitors to hotel sites will regularly print details of resorts and hotels and the use of a separate print style sheet would provide this.

Interface
The page looks cluttered and the content elements do not have enough space to breathe. This is most clearly evident in the left side column where the offers hotel images and text is placed tightly against the containing boxes. I think the rounded corners have been over used and the overall effect results in a page that is hard to read and scan.

Other interface thoughts:

• As Nick Gassman on the Travolution blog pointed out, the use of the label ‘Agent id’ is confusing and could put off and deter non trade users.
• The Youtravel.com logo does not link back to the home page and the unused space to the right of the logo looks odd. Perhaps a strapline or banner related to offers would be appropriate.
• The hotel search form is poorly designed. Youtravel.com purports to have the best online booking system and with a growing database of hotels it goes without saying that an easy to use search form is a key aspect of the site’s success. It looks too cluttered and contains too many options. Perhaps it could be simplified and certain criteria (such as the Board option) could be moved to the advanced search. Youtravel.com has commented that it aims to have trade clients make up 80% of its custom but the site should tailor more appropriately to each audience).
• A pop up calendar would enable the user to quickly choose a date.
• The ‘Destinations’ element is not easily readable; the list is provided in a linear format, the scroll feature hides over half of the options and the word ‘hotels’ has been unnecessarily repeated. Perhaps this feature could be displayed on the left or right columns with more space provided for the main hotel search. The ‘Destinations’ could also be arranged in a drop down enabling the user to quickly scroll through the options – the number of hotels/resorts could also be provided in brackets to indicate the strength of Youtravel.com’s coverage in each.
• The short guide called ‘Bookings’ is badly written and although it is a new site with many first time visitors, it may be better placed in a separate (guide) area and linked to from the Hotel search form.