Red or Green? Accessibility of Lufthansa Seat Selections
Soon, I’ll fly to the US on a business trip, so I checked into my flight with Lufthansa earlier today. As most airlines nowadays, they let you choose where you’d like to sit, which looks something like this:
Sadly, this is hardly accessible for people with “disabilities”: Not only is it a Flash application (which is a pretty bad idea accessibility-wise anyway), but also for people with red-green colorblindness (like myself), it is extremely hard to distinguish occupied seats from empty ones, as they only differ in color, and do not have any additional distinguishing features.
When you look at other airlines’ seat selectors, you’ll notice that Lufthansa has, in comparison, made a particularly bad choice. Northwest Airlines’ seat selector, for instance, looks like this:
The difference is obvious: When a seat is occupied, instead of bothering only with a different color, NWA just puts a little person into the spot. In addition, other meaningful symbols are employed to display other options, such as accessible seating (wheelchair symbol) or seats that can be purchased for an additional fee (the dollar sign).
What’s so bad about Lufthansa’s design choice is that the most central difference in this UI is no different at all when you find yourself among the approx. 6 % of males with deuteranomaly.
What does this mean for developers? It may sound trivial, but: Make similar things similar, and different things different. If you have a very limited set of UI elements for the task at hand, make them sufficiently different for the user to distinguish without guesswork — this won’t only help the “challenged” users, but all of them will need less time and thinking, and thus have a better user experience. There’s more to UI design than color, as Alex Faaborg outlined in this an older blog article about quantitative design.
Ouch. As someone who has Red-Green colour-blindness myself I often scoff at attempts to make things “colour-blind friendly” as they often don’t really know what they’re doing and end up doing ridiculous things like avoiding the colours altogether, but I have to admit in this case I thought all the seats in the original Lufthansa image were red until you pointed out they weren’t. Terrible usability.
Wow huge choice on empty seats.
Anyways, as I’m not color-blind it’s hard to imagine how difficult it is to distinguish the empty seats. To be honest, I’d sometimes would like to walk in your shoes just to understand how you expierence the world around you.
As I haven’t flown on Lufthansa for quite a while (I usually prefer the competitor), I think i remember that their reservation-system once used blue and yellow.
This choice might not be as intuitive as the red/green solution, but at least it would stick with the Lufthansa CI and be better for the red-green color-blind.
The red-green issue should be addressed (perhaps put a red cross on unavailable seats and make the seat & cross faint), but otherwise I prefer the Lufthansa view because I can instantly understand it. Lufthansa has 6 empty seats whereas Northwest have, um, 47? 42? 37? 15? 10? 5? OK, so the legend helps, but the Northwest view is hard to understand out of context, while the Lufthansa view isn’t. This probably has more to do with the pricing structure, though.