

Why Analytical Applications Fail - bkovitz
http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/why-analytical-applications-fail/

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pskomoroch
Comparing travelocity and kayak is interesting, but the best flight scheduling
interface is ITA's demo app (seems to be down right now):

<http://matrix.itasoftware.com/>

It gives a color coded matrix of flights, and all the info is captured in one
screen. I think orbitz and others use their optimizer as a backend.

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wallflower
This has been referenced before on News.YC; this is an interesting paper about
the design and implementation of ITA's optimizer.

"Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning" by Carl de Marcken (2003)
[http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-
com...](http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-
complexity/ITA-software-travel-complexity.pdf)

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SingAlong
Cool!

Its a very detailed analysis of analytical sites. Examples shown serve
different fields - travel and web traffic. And even usability of analytical
sites is broken down by time!

That was a great read for. I am developing a set of news analysis tools and
this post helps.

But I am still wondering what could be done in my case?

I have a totally varied set of tools. Some of them show graphs, some maps and
some text data. I have separated the mashup into sub-tools. But now after
reading this post, it makes me think about presenting the overview of all the
types of results on the overview page like the Google Analytics dashboard.
Then, I still have to think about users with slow internet connections, since
the page load time might increase (and there might be time out errors from my
servers resulting in half-loaded pages).

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kingkongrevenge
I think the target user for sites like travelocity is probably fairly
inflexible in their preferences. They want higher income, price insensitive
business people who specifically want from point A to point B at time X. The
sites and airlines don't really want to cater to College Kid Joe who's
carefully weighing his options and playing around with them to save $150.
Those people just don't drive revenue.

