KeithAhern.com

How NOT to do an iPhone/Mobile Site - Jetstar.com for iPhone

Jetstar have an iPhone site that’s so bad its actually damaging to the mobile web.

Let’s have look at the site analysed under Safari’s network timeline.

So what’s wrong with this picture?

• 3 seconds page load time ! (over wifi)
• 105K page weight for very little information, it not clear what benefit the 83K of javascript provides. 
• HTML and css is not compressed (see the ‘!’ bubbles in the diagram) 
• Non-bundled JS and CSS files - multiple CSS and JS files slow down page loads

So its slow, inefficient and not exactly pretty.  What about the content? Well, its just about useless:

•  the ‘Sales fares’ and ‘Standard fares’ links are misleading - they link to pages with no information about fares!
• The pages above prompt the user to visit jetstar.com on your ‘computer browser’ - no link to jetstar.com which Mobile Safari is perfectly capable of rendering.
• There is a phone number to call to make bookings but its you can’t click it to make the iPhone call the number (The contact pages also lack click to call)
• The flight schedule page links to PDF files missing an opportunity to use the iPhone UI to drill down schedules through times, destinations, classes etc.
• No link to regular site - there’s no way to get to the regular non-crippled jetstar.com site where users may actually want to buy tickets.  

Sure - it ticks the box of ‘We have an iPhone site’ but it really is a lousy experience for customers.  Mobile phones - especially the iPhone are perfectly capable of providing a fast, secure airline information and booking site.

Keith’s Mobile Goodness Score: 2/10

It goes to show you really do need to employ mobile experts when you want to tap into the 3 billion mobile users out there.