[Sigia-l] Lynch Mob Wanted: Flight Booking Interface Behaviour

[Stew Dean]

At 00:01 07/06/2005, Andrew wrote:
>Hi Folks,
>
>has anyone ever tried to book air travel online to somewhere without daily 
>flights and received the "we have no flights available to this destination 
>on this day, ha ha, please guess again" message?
>
>I can't believe that such poor usability exists in this day and age. I am 
>somewhere, and I want to go somewhere else. Maybe I can leave a day 
>earlier or later if it means that I can leave on that day. Maybe I can 
>leave a day earlier or later if there is a direct flight and it will save 
>me 500 bucks. A tiny little bit of adaptive and/or fuzzy behaviour would 
>go a very long way. They seem to have "do you want fries with that" down 
>pat, but I am not going to buy the fries if they don't have the burger I want?

I recently did some online booking of hotels and flights using two very 
well known travel sites and came across several very similar problems.  For 
example being able to find a hotel then say how many rooms I wanted and how 
many in each was too much for one site starting with 'E' to handle. The 
ability to go back and revise things appeared to be some kind of strange 
idea.  Instead I had to get into their way of thinking of trips.

My thinking is often these sites get so enthralled with adding 
functionality and trying to find clever ways to do it they miss the key to 
good usability, namely simplicity.  Just when I think the big sites have 
got the idea of user experience I find too many cases on large web sites 
that make me realise there is still an ongoing battle and too many 
decisions are being made simply on the wrong scale. I think one new mantra 
I might add to my user experience  presentations is 'think small'.

Stew Dean