What Terminal 4 at Madrid airport teaches us about web design

4 February 2010

I experienced many airports during my travels while at Profero but none infuriated me more than Madrid’s Terminal 4. It was opened in 2006 in a blaze of glory and heralded as one of the most modern airports in the world. Its architects were subsequently lauded with the Stirling prize for excellence in architecture. However, the building seems to me to have one fundamental flaw: it completely lost sight of its basic purpose, which is to provide a fantastic experience for the traveller.

To prove the point, I collected data over two years and found Madrid was by far the most inefficient airport in Europe. It took twice as long to get out of Madrid with luggage than Heathrow Terminal 5, and to exit you had to walk twice as far as the average for a European airport. Unfortunately the bad experience doesn’t end there when you add a badly designed security system and the distance to gates. What’s clear is the ‘interface’ - that is, the points where I came into contact with the airport as a system for moving travellers around - decreased my productivity and wasted time.

So what has this to do with web design? Well, I think sometimes the digital industry is more focused on aesthetics rather than the user experience. A case in point is Craigslist. Wired asked how it is that such an ugly site can be so successful and invited its readers to redesign the site. Yet when we had the privilege of an audience with Craig Newmark at Creative Social and the question of the look and feel of his site was posed, he simply said, “My users like it as it is, so why change it?”

In fact, look at the top six global sites (Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Windows Live and Wikipedia) to see what the most visited websites in the world look like. They’re hardly examples of overly beautiful design. Rather than a sleek look and feel, their focus is on the experience, making the complex look simple.
It’s also worth comparing something like Zappos with Nike’s online store. It feels to me that the Nike brand team has had significant influence here whereas the Zappos team, unhindered by brand concerns of look and feel, have provided a far superior online shopping experience.

There’s no doubt that many agencies are getting it very right, but there are still too many agencies (and brands) that are getting the balance a little wrong. And until all agencies building websites, whatever their backgrounds, have a dedicated user experience specialist, they’ll continue to get this balance wrong.

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