The Aer Lingus flight options display also suffers in that the most important information does not stand out. The departure time, which along with the price is the most important information, is difficult to spot. The Aer Lingus flight options display lists up to five flights at or after the specified time. Some of these may be the next day. More than one of our users failed to realise that the blue text meant next day and wondered why the flight times were not listed in order.
Blue text has no natural association with the concept of 'next day'.
Although Aer Lingus provide written instructions on the page to say that the blue colour indicates next day, those instructions are placed well away from the instances of blue text and are included with a lot of other text which almost no users will read. Users almost always ignore written instructions, particularly where there are a lot of them - and the Aer Lingus site in general contains a lot of instructions. Meaning is best conveyed by design alone, but where written instructions are necessary they should at least be placed next to their subject matter. Completing the administration procedures Online purchase processes inevitably involve some form filling. But Aer Lingus takes this to extremes by insisting that the user goes through the lengthy process of registering for its TAB frequent flyer scheme.