Stephen,
appreciate the icons but how crutial are they? Once again you, as a design team not personally,are ignoring some very important requests. Your priorities are pretty much backwards. People have been asking for more information on the listing pages. These valuable information are hidden in the '+' areas or by clicking on the aircraft.
To give you an idea, i still cannot see what aircraft is assigned with a fleet management label by looking at 'view aircraft'. You need to put more and valuable information on the opening page.
By toggling all the rows to display/close, this basically allows the same view within 1 extra click. I am going to move the toggle button to the top of the tables, but it will take a few minutes.
I will voice the same opinion that i did after the release of this new version,the website is too crowded. You decided to add 'fancy' features by adding more irrelevant data to the left and to the right of the screen.
On view aircraft , do i really need to see 'purchase tokens' window?
The "Fancy" features on the right of the screen should have been there since roughly 2006/2007. I designed AM with a main table area for the left and a small table area for the right. The only major change here is that there are intermittent photos appearing.
On the left side, we have moved the airline details from the top of the page to the left. Once the private worlds were launched they would have caused design problems in terms of fitting everything in up there.
In terms of navigation, I wouldn't mind adding an extra box to the left of the screen, where a user can place for example 5 pages they regularly use, and they can simply click on the link to go there from any page, instead of using the menu bar.
I can also look at using Javascript to change the menus to rollover and change the lower row. However I am by no means skilled in Javascript and will probably need help from our third developer.
Here's a very important statistics for you: when i open the 'view aircraft' screen , the area that i see the information that i want to see , where the aircraft are listed, is occupying 17% of the screen. Yep, only 17% is the information that is being displayed is valuable to me.
What is your screen resolution size? The idea of the design change there and in routes was to make the number of rows visible than before. Again on this front, there may be something we can do for the left side of the screen, but my skills are not up to the task and I wont really discuss what I have in mind unless I find someone who can do it.
Take a look at the Purchase Aircraft area on the same screen. Becuase of the drop down screens you have a large area dedicated to the right side.. It's eating away so much real estate, it's unbelivable..
That has been there since the beginning of AM.
Lastly, the problems that you are running into are because of bad management of this project.I know we discussed this before, but you have to have some kind of a planning, oversight, project management about these.
I wont deny project management is poor.
When you have a major issue like hot swapping aircraft where it's going to make things easier for 13K+ users , you cannot deal with small stuff..
Availability of suitable developers is the issue here. I prefer to let this feature be developed by someone with greater skills in this area than myself.
I got critisized before for being too harsh on you and i have offered my help. It's been a week and noone contacted me from your management team. My offer is still valid..
I may have missed that, and will look back over your posts.
Lastly, where are most of the 'team' located? If they are concentrated to a certain time zone, then you should consider having multiple teams from different parts of the world so that you can make this 'volunteer' project and on going 24 hr long development.
There are 3 developers. One in the United States. He has a full time job aside from AM and currently works on improving the performance of the database and the server. He has done huge work here and cleaned up my crap progressively since he joined.
Two of us are based in Europe. I am a full time honours degree final year student and I devote about 30mins to AM in terms of development time daily. Admin tasks are performed when I get a chance in college. Weekends are a mix of leisure and AM time. There have been two advertisements this year for developers, but no final appointments were made.
I appreciate the feedback and I hope I have made a balanced approach to the answer.
Just on a side note, I don't suppose anyone noticed the lack of advertising at the top of the page? Despite the fact it was a top earning position, I thought it might be a welcome change.
