[Sigia-l] Homunculus Wanted: Flight Booking Interface Behaviour

Tue Jun 7 10:30:02 EDT 2005

I think the 80/20 rule is an excellent observation here.  I book a great
deal of travel online for myself and on occasion I am frustrated. For
example, finding that between the time I chose an itinerary and the time I
checked out, my seat had been sold, and/or the price had changed. I also
always forget to request an isle seat - it is just not an obvious choice in
the booking process.

I have also experienced the "flight not available, guess again" UI
feature...  For the most I am impressed with the ways in which so much
information and so many choices can be presented to a casual user.  (Perhaps
I am no longer in this category, but I am certainly not a travel
professional).

Remember when in the old days, people required, or even expected to be
trained on a complex or sophisticated application?  Nowadays we all - and
especially our users - expect everything to be "intuitive".  For public
sites, if our UI is less intuitive than our competition then we lose
business.  For internal systems, we want knowledge processes, complicated
workflow and content management to be "intuitive", yet the nature of work
requires expertise and fluency in tools and applications.

Can you imagine (and maybe this is a poor analogy) an untrained person (not
a professional) walking up to a carpentry job and complain that the tools
and materials are not intuitive?  "I can't see how to build a garage with
this stuff, its not intuitive".  In most parts of most organizations
everyone performs at least some degree of knowledge work.  They are
knowledge professionals (again, perhaps my analogy is going too far - of
course they are more than that) their tools are office productivity
applications as well as systems used to collaborate and share the outputs of
their knowledge.  Why should they expect to use the tools of their
organization without any training?

Of course I realize that expectations are changing and business changes so
quickly that in a large organization it would be impossible to train
everyone on everything (besides they would forget most of it unless applying
that knowledge on a day to day basis).

Also the nature of underlying content and functionality changes so quickly
that things have to be "intuitive".  I may not know something exists but I
need to "follow the trail" (Was that Jared Spool who coined that phrase?) in
order to track it down.

We all need tiny homunculi in each of our applications to tell us where to
find stuff or how to accomplish a task and, in a way, as information
architects and UI designers we are trying to do that.  We take for granted
that some of the early artificial intelligence applications were
commercialized in word processors.  Forget about Clippy, the applications
anticipate a lot about how we work infer our intended actions.  When
designing apps we're trying to infer tasks and create a path through the
information embedding the homunculus in the app.

Seth

Seth Earley
Earley & Associates, Inc
781-444-0287
781-820-8080 cell
Taxonomy consulting, conference calls
and community of practice
www.earley.com/events.htm

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org]On
Behalf Of T. Karsjens
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 9:30 AM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] Homunculus Wanted: Flight Booking Interface
Behaviour

My experience is that most business types don't book their own travel
online.  They call their most trusted travel agent and have them book it for
them.

Which, to me, means that the travel agents of the world are a much larger
percentage of the user base for travel sites than joe public, considering
the percentage of business travel versus all others.

So, if you want a review of the usability of a travel site, ask the primary
user base what they think.  I was in a position a couple of years ago to ask
about 2000 travel agents what they thought of travel sites.  A large
percentage said that sites like Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia all did a
bang up job filling their intended roles.  Of course, every travel agent
that I talked to had suggestions for improvement, but the over all
impression was decent with the only near homogenous complaint being the
technology behind the interface not working. Most of the agents that I
talked to thought aspects of one particular site was better than another,
but they used all of them nearly equally.

While we may find it appalling, bear in mind that they, at least a couple of
years ago, by and large do not.  This may be a case of an 80/20 rule where
we are in the 20%.  I think the larger issue is asking ourselves why we get
so bent out of shape when we are the ones falling in the "20%".

Timothy Karsjens
Interface Architect
Agile Methods Advocate
Almost Human Studios

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Steven L. MacCall
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 7:59 AM
To: 'Anjali Arora, NYU'; sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] Homunculus Wanted: Flight Booking Interface Behaviour

Has anyone wondered how all of this emotion (or the lack thereof, in the
case of business travel) has been successfully managed within the management
architecture of real travel agencies over the years?

Perhaps we're asking IA/UI design to do too much, especially in the travel
sector ... where's a homunculus when you need one ;-)

Oh, I forgot, travel agents require expensive health insurance and
retirement benefits!

slm

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Anjali Arora, NYU
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 6:56 AM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Lynch Mob Wanted: Flight Booking Interface Behaviour

Right Andrew, often times all that the user needs is to get the job done &
move on ( and not have too many things, especially emotions of anger &
frustration take over the process : )
And this too would be a successful example of designing the user experience.

But it's also about knowing who you are catering to. For the leisure
traveler or the family going on vacation, the design strategy would be
different from one aimed at the business traveler. for the former, the bonus
of a magical experience ( over & above makings things just work well, very
important no doubt) such as stoking the imagination or excitement or longing
for those distant lands might be very appropriate.
( Now what would be really fun to do is to create a just-right magical
experience for the business traveler, & I mean more than just efficiently
getting the booking done!!)

Best.
-anjali

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