Feedback on the AFF website & brand refresh

[ausfox]

Forced back to classic style to allow faster reading. Too much emphasis on colour rather than communication. A bit of movement and we would have the wiggles.

 

[DC3]

AFF Classic style is good.

 

[DC3]

Purple? Seriously? Of all the colours in the universe?

An almost fluorescent aubergine

 

[Cruiser Elite]

OMG - focus groups? Must have been a big night out for the 'wet behind the ears IT kids' before getting down to actually reviewing

 

[kookaburra75]

Like many others I found the typeface, size and colour too hard to read and have switched back to the Classic view. I'm not quite sure what you were trying to achieve with the changes. Change, just for changes sake is not always a good thing to do.

 

[Blackadder]

Bonza Purple lives on.
Seriously , not sure why the refresh was needed, the main difference I can see is a higher emphasis on Credit Cards and points transfers. I guess good for those that want to do that.
Additionally on the home page , it prompts you to log in (even if already logged in) , then when you click login you get hit with the screen below.

 

[Melburnian1]

When one opens the site, it looks terrible.

A pointless (apologies for the poor pun) change.

 

[AV8]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

 

[Mr_Orange]

Overall feeling about the main home page (which I never use) is that it looks like the new(ish) Bankwest web site and a number of other web sites whereby it has been designed by and for 5 year olds with oversized, bubbly fonts, far too much white space and no thought to useability.

The forum is still fine though .

 

[Supersonic Swinger]

In my experience, rebrands are usually done for two reasons:

1. The marketing department have run out of ideas and want to be let loose on a new big project; or
2. There's a bigger corporate objective at play for which a rebrand provides good cover for.

It could be both here, but AFF has been slowly shifting from a user generated content focus to one where the owners are trying to relentlessly monetise loyal eyeballs e.g the incessant referral links ads which you cannot disable with ad blockers, the new home page which no longer features interesting aviation news but only sign up and referral links.

I have seen these shifts happen time and again, which inevitably result in two outcomes:

1. The website becomes unusable (hello, Pointhacks)
2. As the "user generated content" becomes harder to find amongst the corporate articles / messaging / advertising, the community dribbles away and the forums die (anyone remember the old inthemix site?)

It feels like AFF is well down this path. Thankfully, sites like FlyerTalk and airliners.net still focus on member content. I hope the AFF owners realise that the only reason you can post referral links is because they are set amongst the primary reason for this site, which is user generated content by a large engaged community who can easily contribute without feeling they are constanty being sold to.

I have gone back to the old style, and hope the forums continue in their current form regardless of the Point Hacks-ification of the rest of the site.

 

[Mr_Orange]

The forum is still fine though

When I said this, I didn't realise that I was still on an old style. Having checked out the new style, I'm switching back.

The contrast is bad - why don't UI designers understand the importance of contrast - the font is bad and the letter spacing is bad.

Overall, it's bad.

Interesting to note that the responses posted by AFF to date make no comment on anything other than bugs and gloss over the actual feedback. Threads like this are designed to placate users but are essentially ignored.