Feedback on the AFF website & brand refresh

[dairyfloss]

The logo hurts the eye. I wonder if a designer was involved in that part of it.

on the positive side, it means we can now refer to the QF wet leases as AFF metal

 

[admin]

My first impression when visiting the site just now was that the site got hijacked. It looks like a commercial website trying to sell you something rather than a community that discusses the latest Australian travel news IMHO. One of the reasons I would visit AFF from time to time is to see that front page where I could learn about a new "enhancement" to Velocity or something else. Also the design pops out quite a bit. Yes it does look a bit more modern than the prior AFF, but if you care about finding the relevant content I would argue this is a significant downgrade.

People are referring to the actual homepage - which no longer features any news content whatsoever, and is essentially useless compared to how it was previously.

There is a new page where you can see all of the latest articles on AFF. By default, this page shows articles in all categories, with the most recently published articles at the top. You can also filter by category to just see (for example) Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Air Canada, or any combination of different types of articles.

This is the page, which you might want to bookmark:

Latest News - Australian Frequent Flyer

See a full list of the latest airline & loyalty program news, guides, reviews and more published on Australian Frequent Flyer.

www.australianfrequentflyer.com.au

We do realise that the page still needs a little bit of work, and we'll spruce it up a bit over the coming days.

You can also get to this page by clicking "Latest News" in the top header menu on the new home page.

 

[admin]

Makes no difference to emails I'm afraid.

Also, for the weekly (?) gazette emails ......
View attachment 461702

The buttons don't present correctly. All in all, just a poorly thought out redesign.

Thanks for flagging the issue with the buttons in the redesigned Gazette. We are working on a fix for this, and hopefully the text will be more visible in future editions.

 

[moa999]

Wondered what this thread was about.. seems I was stuck on one of the older themes - Classic (Alternative).

I don't mind the purple or the modern serif fonts.... Though not a fan of the relatively dark background for quotes.

 

[NoName]

Connect with over 65,000 expert flyers? Sorry, but this kind of stuff irks me due to its inherent dishonesty. I have seen claims like this on other forums to make the engagement seem impressive. Sure, there have probably been 65,000 different screen names created over the years but how many of those are active participants currently? A huge number likely signed up and never made a single post.

 

[straitman]

How do I change it back please?

See the comments from admin. Post #82 and a few more.

 

[DejaBrew]

Thanks for the pickup - it seems the member lounge part of the website has been broken by the change. We'll look at fixing this ASAP

Speaking of the Member Lounge page/link, there's also this....



The contrast is way worse on mobile....

 

[flyguy77]

Connect with over 65,000 expert flyers? Sorry, but this kind of stuff irks me due to its inherent dishonesty.

So you are telling me that Pointhacks claim of 1 MILLION Aussies trusting them with their points isn't accurate either??

Surely not.....

 

[bussyboy]

My $0.05

For the forum, I really prefer the Classic Dark mode as I can't read bright screens for long. Thankfully, I wouldn't have known the change unless I'd read this forum - looked at the new style for a couple of minutes and switched back, but a new Dark theme in line with the changes would be okay in my mind, when your devs get to it.

Appreciating that you've got to constantly change and refresh to help stay relevant, keep up the hard work team.

 

[Scarlett]

Capitalised? Why capitalised?*




* This needs to be read in a Lollipopman ‘Max VERstappen’ voice. Like this:

 

[lovestotravel]

Straight back to classic style, the new colours and font are laughable

 

[bussyboy]

Are these actual members?




I'd no idea Capital One operated in Australia

 

[DejaBrew]

Are these actual members?

 

[DC3]

We AFFers can be hard to please at times.

 

[LondonAussie]

Read the thread.

Unfortunately I was finding it a bit hard to read everything in the new style and font, but thankfully someone much more helpful directed me to the instructions and I'm now back on Classic Style.

 

[kangarooflyer88]

Another point I should bring up here is it's unclear how to even access news (which is one of the main draws to me of the website). If I go searching around the front page there are no latest news articles but rather two big links at the bottom to Qantas and Virgin news. The problem with those links is that doesn't encompass all of the news that impacts Australian aviation. For instance, I recall a story a few weeks ago that was talking about the Singapore Airlines spontaneous escapes promotion and what routes were on offer during the promotion. Well technically that story could not fit in either category but it most certainly affects Aussies planning a trip to Europe.

I do notice that there is a small link at the menu bar at the top called Latest News, which if you click it, you'll be taken to a webpage that indeed shows the latest news, so I guess that's something I'll have to bookmark. But even then, I would argue that this page is less helpful than the prior front page as it contains less information per story to help me decide whether to read it.

One of the thing that AFF has going for it is the news. And having that "in your face," was something I looked forward to when I visited AFF. I don't want to be hunting around the website to see what stories the editors want to share with us. Indeed, if you go to any frequent flyer website be it PointHacks, FlyerTalk or ORAAT, you'll see the first thing you are presented with are those stories.

And these stories really matter for us frequent flyers. Programs are constantly changing and if you want to have any chance of making good use of points, miles and status you need to stay informed. Consider a member who is part of Virgin's Velocity program. As I think we're all aware, Velocity made a number of changes last year, most of which I think we could agree made redemptions and obtaining status more challenging than before. Where would they find out about these "enhancements," and prepare accordingly? Some might say, from Virgin Australia's email they sent out. Well I don't know about you but I get a ton of emails every day and some of them get flagged as spam and are unseen. So far as I'm aware, AFF is one of the few websites that is committed to providing regular travel news and discussion specifically for the Australian market. If I go to FlyerTalk or these other sites, sure I'll see tons of stories about American or Southwest, but quite frankly it does me (and I suspect many on this forum) no good as I don't fly those airlines or am part of those programs.

So I suppose to summarize and make an appeal to the AFF team, what sets AFF apart from all the other travel websites out there aside from the community, is the up to date news and content including on the website, in the Podcast and through the various training programs available. If you could invest the time on improving both the quantity and quality of that content, I think that will make a bigger dent in growing the community and revenues than a website redesign. People come to AFF for the community and the content.

-RooFlyer88

 

[Pushka]

The new logo looks more like a plane taking off when it's just a tab on open pages. Like here. But not when it's close up. And I can't unsee Finnair then.

 

[aus_flyer]

Hate the design changes to the forums. This font?!?! Terrible

 

[bussyboy]

The new logo looks more like a plane taking off when it's just a tab on open pages. Like here. But not when it's close up. And I can't unsee Finnair then.

View attachment 461925

That's a steep climb angle though, for any passenger aircraft! Agreed it looks more like a "f" that fell over.

 

[DejaBrew]

I've noticed a vertical alignment issue with fonts in the new AFF Style theme. To illustrate, look at the screenshots below showing the alignment of emojis + text in the Classic theme vs the same in the new theme -:


Vertical alignment in the new theme seems to push align text with the top edge of the text line, whereas it's nicely centred in the Classic theme.

This is illustrated when you highlight/select the text in the Classic theme vs the new theme. Note how the text is actually aligned several pixels higher than the emoji in the new theme, whereas they're perfectly aligned in Classic -: