Shawn Chittle: user interface/user experience

Flycell Sub-Genre Filtering Mechanism

For Flycell.com, we needed a way to filter out sub-genres of music that didn't fit a customer's listening preferences. For instance, a user might enjoy rap, but not the "gangster" type, or the "dirty south" type. As information architect, I created and labeled these new sub-genres for Rock, Rap, Latin, Jazz, etc. Then, I designed an AJAX-based filtering mechanism, which I had already used at Flightsafety for our reservation system.

As a result, customers are now able to quickly filter out (or in) any sub-genre of music they want in any number of major categories. Of course, with all the sub-genres a category can have, I made sure we had select all and select none options, to quickly opt in or out.

A "negative" null results experience must always be mitigated. If no titles matched the customer's wishes, we upsold them on another sub-genre or showed them popular songs in a similar genre. Never should a customer see "no results found" in e-commerce. This is one of the things I learned at Amazon.com; if you think it like a "real" store, sometimes if the shelf is empty, there is something close by that satisfies what the customer is looking for.

Always seeking new, innovative approaches, I believe this is the first sub-genre filtering mechanism for music that I've found on the internet. Most sites use static links to serve other genres of music, which requires a lot of back and forth in the browser. With AJAX, we can serve any sub-genre of music right on the page, right in the same field of view.

This is a much more engaging and satisfying experience.

FlightSafety Internal Reservation & Requirements Management System

For FlightSafety.com, I designed an all-new, robust yet lightweight, user interface system for searching reservations, customers and clients. After paper prototyping the site and running several usability tests, the simplest, cleanest designs bore out as the most usable. These systems were brand new to the company and training budgets were almost non-existent. As such, the system had to be easy to use out of the box for maximum ROI.

Several interesting design features were developed for this system. The red, green, orange status tabs show the user exactly what "state" each tab is in. Whether they have the "green light" to proceed to the next tab, or have "orange" cautions or "red" warnings, you can get a sense of how far along a process is and what state its in by a quick glance at the colored tabs.

Before the usability test, small text links were tried for database actions. Users couldn't find them. So big buttons were used instead with users finding them with little trouble.

Lastly, a simple two pane add/remove panel was designed to accommodate adding and removing clients to a reservation. Color coded buttons gave users confidence in moving through the process.