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Comment by uiri | Hacker News Reader

Curious why the user didn't click back instead of on the home button around slide 70-75. It would have saved them about 50 slides or so and 10-15 minutes of real time. They clearly saw the back button later around slide 120. The micro-pessimization of looking at the account creation flow before attempting to book a flight also seemed somewhat unnecessary.

While it is not an excuse for the poor design, I am not sure why you would search award travel if you don't have any points/miles to redeem nor even have an account. They even leave the boxes unchecked by default. Clearly a better UI would have process equally streamlined both for new users and for customers with United miles/points to spend.

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My thoughts exactly. Of course a lot of room for improvement in all these airline apps but the person was intentionally playing dumb on a few of those steps knowing it would double the number of steps. Of course the app should have better protection and warnings to prevent that from happening but since reading that on a phone with no swipe to view next slides and having to tap that tiny arrow that often zoomed in instead shows the author may want to focus on their own app a bit first.

Right, along with complaining that 'Show Nearby Airports' doesn't work when you've forbidden location services.

Usually that feature is to give flexible airport options. So if you search for SFO it will also give you OAK. Nothing to do with your current location.

The question asked was "Allow United to access your location even when you are not using the app?”. It's not clear that answering "no" would prevent the app from accessing location when you are using the app.

That's a failing of iOS, not the app - that is a system dialog that allows an app to ask for foreground only location services, or background location services (and this is the dialog presented, no customization allowed).

That's probably something a software developer / tech inclined person would know. Then again, they might assume the app is clever enough to roughly geo-locate you via IP address, and it would kinda make sense as even just knowing the town or state someone is in significantly narrows down the likely list of airports.

But even that uncertainty aside, tech folk are not the primary target audience for this app. The general flying public are. I'm not sure all of this would be immediately obvious to them. And hitting yes to a dialog that sounds as if it's asking for permission to track your every movement sounds kinda scary to me...

The point is that he didn't have an incentive to approve such wide permissions at that point. They should have waited to ask permissions until that screen, or given more information as to why you should approve their request.

On iOS it's also pretty cumbersome to allow these things after disallowing them. You have to go into settings, find the privacy tab, go to the correct requirement and then find the app to toggle it on.

I agree it's not clear from this article alone, but I've read his previous publications and it comes up a lot.

I actually thought those buttons would result in additional results, rather than narrowing down his/her later choices. Either that or they'd do nothing, since that's what the other button of that type that they encountered seemed to do...

Admittedly I don't fly that much, maybe once a year. But I still don't quite get some of these 'frequent flyer point' schemes. Do you get them as a reward for flying? Or, as in this case, are they always 'disney money' that buy flights?

It's like you're angrily agree with the OP.

> I am not sure why you would search award travel if you don't have any points/miles to redeem

Well in this day and age of award bonuses, sign up awards, maybe they believed they might have some already. This wasn't made apparent in the app.

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