Alaska Airlines Open In New Tab

✋ What is it?

This is a solution found in the Alaska Airlines in-flight website. When you open the flight tracker map, the website teaches you with a coach-mark that the arrow button on the top right corner launches the tracker in a new tab of the browser.

🤲 How does this interaction or solution work?

Alaska Airlines as many other airlines in North America provides in-flight WiFi for the passenger. The WiFi is generally a paid service that requires a payment to enable free browsing. However, many airlines like Alaska provide extra functionality through their WiFi at no cost.

These functionalities include In-Flight entertainment, airline information, gateway information, and flight tracker.

When passengers connect to Alaska Airlines' in-flight WiFi and navigate to the flight tracker, they are greeted by a small coach-mark that teaches them about a dedicated button to launch the map in a new tab. Doing the latter, allows the passengers to keep navigating the in-flight website while having a single tab for their flight information.

🙌 How does this interaction or solution work?

Navigability and Learnability

In this example, we see two solutions that improve the experience of the passenger visiting this website.

On the one hand, we have a classic coach-mark that teaches the user about functionality that is not evident in the first layer of interaction.

On the other hand, the functionality that the coach-mark is teaching (a dedicated button to open the map in a new tab), is by itself a great solution that improves the navigability of the website and allows users to quickly trigger an expected interaction for a page of this nature (launching in a new tab to keep at hand).