

Hipmunk needs to ramp up on usability - durga
http://durga-ydydt.posterous.com/why-i-dont-use-hipmunk

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potatolicious
I could not disagree more vehemently.

1\. Default sorting by agony has been _wonderful_ for me. I'm willing to pay a
moderate amount more for a flight that _doesn't_ suck - whereas most travel
sites would rather assume I'm a complete scrooge that wants to squeeze every
last dollar off the price, redeyes and multi-airline connections be damned!

Hipmunk lets me look at pricing _and_ "quality of experience" at a glance. The
nifty bars also let me make my _own_ decision about the "agony" of the flight
instead of simply trusting Hipmunk's own metric.

2\. IMHO, nonsense. I've never been once confused by the "from $XXX" term on
Hipmunk - it means that the price can vary depending on what I select for the
other leg. Secondly, the problem with Kayak's approach is that I have to sift
through _endless_ pages of the _same_ departing flight, but with varying
returning flights - or vice versa. That's not empowering, that's tedium. If I
could count the times on Kayak where I've had to compare prices, then compare
if the two have the same departing flight... or the same returning flight...
argh.

3\. I don't even know how to respond to this one. Everyone I've shown Hipmunk
to, ever, has been _ecstatic_ about being able to pick the legs separately.
Methinks the blog author falls into an edge case and is not representative of
the general population. Hell, I think this is one of those things that will
make Hipmunk _win_.

4\. So why is the precise departure or arrival important when deciding which
flight you want to book? Does 9:05am vs. 9:20am really make a salient
difference? From what I can tell, the whole _point_ of Hipmunk is that it
gives you a more powerful overarching view of your choices, instead of getting
you stuck in the details. Getting the precise time is as easy as clicking on a
choice - but when I'm making a decision on the quality of a flight I sure as
heck don't need to know my times down to the minute.

5\. I'll agree on this part. Being able to specify departure/arrival time
ranges is pretty powerful.

6\. Could not disagree more. One thing that's I've liked about Hipmunk is the
ability to run multiple searches in parallel. Kayak on the other hand forces
me to open a new tab, fill in _everything all over again_ to do the same. The
fact that Kayak will time-out your (very, very bodacious) search results after
some time makes this doubly annoying. Kayak dumps you a metric ton of data and
expects you to comb through it in _how long_?

7\. Agreed.

Bottom line: I think the author is disconnected from what consumers want out
of flight searches. Or rather, what a large segment of consumers want, who are
under-served by the current players in the market - that is to say, the people
who are willing to pay some premium for a flight experience that isn't
painful, and want a tool that will allow them to make this decision easily.

Kayak was a godsend when it first came out - it was so, so far ahead of what
we dared call online flight booking. But, it's starting to show its age -
lately I don't even want to go to Kayak, the search results page is like nails
on chalkboard.

Here's a suggestion to Kayak that (IMHO) would massively improve the UX: group
flight pairs by departing flight. Give me each departing flight, then for each
departing flight give me the available returning flights and the corresponding
package prices. That would make the results _so_ much easier to parse. As it
is I get 10 different results that are all actually the same departing flight
paired with every possible returning flight under the sun. It's annoying.

~~~
RandallBrown
Yes, Hipmunk is very usable once you figure out how to use it, but after being
trained by every travel website on the planet for years it is not very easy to
use at first. I agreed with most of the authors points.

Last time I took a trip I tried out Hipmunk and was very confused about the
picking my return flight separately. Once I figured it out, it was pretty
cool. I still used Kayak though.

Kayaks ability to specify departure and arrival times is just too convenient
if you're trying to work around a schedule. I think people like picking
flights separately on Hipmunk to solve that exact problem and it's much
simpler to do that on Kayak. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's why I like Kayak
better.

As far as timing out searches goes, flight prices really do change every few
minutes. I've waited an hour to buy a plane ticket and had to pay 20 more
dollars. Kayak lets you save searches so at least you don't have to enter all
your information again.

~~~
uiet
>Kayak lets you save searches so at least you don't have to enter all your
information again.

The free iMacros macro recorder addons for IE, chrome and firefox solve this
issue on any website: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imacros-
for-f...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imacros-for-firefox/)

~~~
djb_hackernews
That is a hack at best around a usability problem in your service if that is
your recommendation.

If I ran a website and my users were using such a thing I'd consider that a
major fail on my part.

------
j79
A year ago, I tried multiple times to use Hipmunk, only to be turned off by
the site. I don't think I "got it" then. Like the author, I found sites like
Kayak or Bing easier to use. It returned the data I needed (cheapest price!)
and did it well.

And then one day I needed to find flights based on departure times. As I
played around with Hipmunk, I realized how much better the experience was.
From the various sort methods (price, time, agony) linking to seatguru.com for
research, and allowing me to purchase my trips in two steps, I've become a
believer. My last three fights have all been booked through hipmunk without
even considering visiting the other sites.

Basically, Hipmunk allows me to book flights that work for me (I want to leave
Thursday at 4:45PM and return Friday at 6:40PM) rather than something that
accommodates me (For 449 dollars, I can leave Thursday at 2:15PM and return
Friday at 9:45PM. Or, if I'm flexible, I can save 50 and leave at 6:00 AM and
return Friday at 4:00 PM... I guess I'll do that...)

~~~
durga
hey j79,

thanks for the comment. :)

I'll confess I don't quite get your last paragraph. Could you elaborate on how
Hipmunk helps with schedules better than Kayak?

thanks Durga

------
thirsteh
My immediate thought was "Nice try, Kayak employee" until I saw the bio at the
bottom of the page.

Your points are a bit strange, and in some cases largely baseless criticism.
You seem to want less power, and less overview? In that case, use any flight
search engine that isn't Hipmunk.

There is one point that I dislike about Hipmunk that you did not touch upon:
Its selection/coverage of non-America flights/airlines is lackluster (although
recently it's been improving). I nearly always have to doublecheck with a
local flight search engine to ensure that I'm getting a fair price.

~~~
durga
Haha. Far from it, I'm a fan of reddit and was excited when Hipmunk came out.
There's a link to my first blog post on Hipmunk at the beginning of this post.

I haven't tried international flights yet. I do think Hipmunk will do really
well if they fix the UI issues, even if they do only domestic flights well.

Didn't get the points in your 2nd paragraph. I'm arguing for more usability;
how does that correspond to less power/overview?

durga

------
onedognight
> 6\. Modifying a flight search

I was hung up by this as well until I learned that "new search" _is_ a
modified search that starts with the parameters from the old search. Still the
lack of a modify button was discocerting even once I figured this out.

An additional complaint: once you select both legs to purchase and a dialog
pops up where you can click to actually purchase there is no "x" to cancel or
"escape" to go back. It was frustrating that I had to reload and lose all of
my state to do this.

~~~
durga
hey onedognight,

Good points.

Hipmunk does start the new search with old parameters. And once one has
discovered that, the mental burden of clicking on "New Search" does go down a
little bit. Agree.

As you point out, the obvious counterpoint: how is this better than modifying
the current search parameters?

One could perhaps argue that when a person is looking for 2 entirely different
flights, it'd be useful to open the new search in a new window. But honestly,
how common is the use case of a person searching for 2 entirely different
flights at the same time? Not very common. When I'm on a travel website, I'm
usually trying to book one particular flight. Perhaps a travel agency would
disagree but is that really the mainstream market?

And if I needed to actually book 2 different flights, I'd just open a new tab
in my browser to search for the 2nd flight. The "New Search" tab has no
business being there.

To your 2nd point: I noticed that and was completely lost when I couldn't find
a way to get rid of the popup. Then I realized by trial and error that
clicking elsewhere on the page made it go away. This behavior might be
intentional: don't give the user an obvious option to cancel, and thereby
hopefully increase conversion. But it's going to backfire - users don't like
to feel trapped.

Kayak has a similar popup with a clear X option.

Durga

------
Sembiance
I had been using Hipmunk ever since I first heard about it on techcrunch. I
stopped using it a few weeks ago when I searched for a flight from BOS to DFW.
Hipmunk told me there were ZERO non-stop flights on the return leg. Yet using
the same exact search criteria on Orbitz or Kayak revealed plenty. I e-mailed
them about it but never received a response, maybe they have fixed it. It
doesn't matter how slick the UI is, if the data can't be trusted, I won't use
it.

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scrrr
I agree. I tried using Hipmunk but I keep going back to Kayak. I find it more
usable and pretty. I can exclude certain airlines or f.ex. flights with more
than one stop with the checkboxes. Plus changing departure and destination
airports is a breeze. (I often browse available flights without having my mind
set up on a destination.) The diagrams are useful, too.

~~~
masklinn
> Plus changing departure and destination airports is a breeze. (I often
> browse available flights without having my mind set up on a destination.)

Hipmunk's "new search" starts from your previous search. Just close the
current tab (or click the new one) and change the destination airport. Even
allows you to keep multiple searches open in different tabs to make your
choice.

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lemuren76
What most of these commenters seem to completely miss is that if a site is not
obvious to a user in 2-6 seconds, it will not work and you will lose users.
You cannot expect people to hover here and there nor read FAQs to understand
the concepts.

I have nothing against HipMunk, but it does lack a clear value proposition
when you land there.

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blackboxxx
I haven't used Hipmunk because Kayak has always delivered results quickly and
painlessly.

Hipmunk reminds me of Macro Economics in college, and how I had to extract so
much information from lines on a graph. I'd break out in a cold sweat when
asked to do so in front of the class. I hated it.

The Hipmunk graphs look like homework to me. I don't want homework. Just state
the information clearly so I can move on with my life.

~~~
masklinn
> The Hipmunk graphs look like homework to me. I don't want homework. Just
> state the information clearly so I can move on with my life.

I find Hipmunk's information very clear: each row is a flight, you get the
price, the rough departure/arrival time, the legs and layovers. If you want
more info out of an interesting flight, click on it. Hovering gives you the
precise departure and arrival times for the flight.

The only kind-of strange thing is the default sorting order, which I generally
find excellent but looks messy at first glance.

In any case, it's unlike homework in every way, shape or form I can think of.

------
maxklein
Hipmunk is good for finding the best flight, but the actual booking is much
better on the carrier website.

