
Is This The Future of The Airline Website? - ahmadss
http://www.f-i.com/fi/airlines/
======
dmbaggett
As a co-founder of ITA Software (travel search) and founder of the company
that makes [http://inky.com](http://inky.com) (email), I often see unexpected
parallels between travel search and email. In both spaces we get periodic
design documents and slide ware that look really cool and get everyone all
excited. But in both spaces these designs rarely get implemented, much less
reach production.

The reason is that the domain details are so extensive and difficult that
almost nobody can get past them. I like to describe both these problem domains
as "fractal," because when you're 100,000 feet up it looks pretty simple, but
the closer you get the more details there are. If I had a dollar for every
hacker who told me how easy it would be to make a travel search web site or an
email client, I'd be rich.

In both spaces, a very small number of players create the core technologies,
and a much larger set of players layer on top of these cores. In travel, for
example, you have the GDS companies (Sabre, Amadeus, etc.), ITA, and Expedia.
Everybody else -- literally, _everybody_ else -- layers on top of one these
systems. Kayak? ITA customer. Hipmunk? ITA customer. Etc. This means the vast
majority of players don't actually have to deal with the fractal domain
complexity. And almost nobody has any clue there's any difference between say,
an ITA and a Hipmunk, even though one has a million lines of code and runs
thousands of machines and the other has a fairly standard website. (#)

Similarly, in email, a handful of players create real mail stacks. These are
the usual suspects (Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM) and a handful of others
(Inky, Sparrow, Thunderbird) Everybody else -- literally _everybody_ else --
layers on top of GMail or Outlook. Mailbox.app? Layer on top of GMail. Xobni?
Layer on top of Outlook. Postbox? Fork of Thunderbird.

In the mail space, there are at least some decent open source libraries to
use. In the travel search space there is literally _nothing_ to start from but
a blank sheet of paper. Carl de Marcken did most of the early work figuring it
out for ITA, and it nearly killed him.

I actually seek out domains like this; either because they're defensible, or
because I'm insane. I'm not sure which yet.

(#) If you're thinking it's necessary or even better to own the million lines
of code and run thousands of machines, think again: Kayak created
substantially more value for its shareholders than ITA did, with a lot less
effort.

~~~
j_s
From [http://demarken.org/carl](http://demarken.org/carl)

    
    
       <style type="text/css">.email {unicode-bidi:bidi-override; direction: rtl;}</style>
       <span class="email">gro.nekcramed&#x40;lrac</span>
    

Genius!

~~~
fcoury
It's genius until you try to copy and paste it into a to: box :)

~~~
toyg
nothing a couple of javascript lines can't fix :)

------
patio11
Terrible idea for selling airline tickets [1], but perhaps less terrible for
selling design consulting.

[1] The airlines believe that, overwhelmingly, their customers know where
they're going and when, and care mostly about how much. "Enticing maps" and
"impressive photography" are unlikely to increase conversion/task success
rates versus typing in "LAX"/"NGO."

The silky smooth transitions are nice, but unfortunately no amount of front-
end UX work will make the backend not take several seconds to look for
possible routes/pricing for you. The multi-page workflows for e.g. Delta.com
(which actually don't suck) partly help to obscure how dog slow the backend is
relative to Internet Speed (TM). A successful rework which made the app feel
much more responsive could have many customers offer the feedback "THE SITE IS
MUCH SLOWER. WTF." and the fact that this feedback is _objectively untrue_
would not prevent it from _costing the airline hundreds of millions of
dollars._

~~~
notahacker
In fairness, obfuscating the slowness of the backend system is one area where
fancy transitions involving planes flying across maps and irrelevant trivia
like weather symbols and "social proof" can actually potentially help,
providing it's interesting enough for people to actually pay attention to.

Fancy graphics are unlikely to sell many flights, but I can't help wondering
whether better visuals added at the right stage of the booking process might
help with ancillary revenues from hotels (and onward flights with one way
tickets). Maps, for example, are a pretty horrendous way to pick the primary
destination, but a potentially useful device for highlighting connecting
flights between long haul hubs and leisure destinations (bet you didn't know
you can book through to Phuket with us?) The interesting work there is still
little to do with UI and a lot more to do with getting the back end to spit
out relevant suggestions without bringing everything to a grinding halt.

Then again, the airline that is perhaps most dependent on ancillary revenues
generated by web upsell is Ryanair and their website is _purposefully ugly_
for branding reasons (ugly = the cheapest) as well as deliberately confusing
for improved conversion for add-ons.

~~~
thezilch
I believe patio11 is positing -- I would -- that the user already knows his
destination (or has a good enough idea) before waiting on a backend search for
pricing. Maps, trivia, weather, etc are useless information in the majority of
cases. Transitions appear useless. Just load my pricing data already! Stop
wasting time loading this crap! It's like 4MB Flash, splash screens before I
can load your 100K site. Yes, technically, in the airlines case, we can
probably load a static image and trivia in the time it takes to query the
backend, but the users are not technical and it just has the appearance of
fluff, and they just want prices!

~~~
notahacker
It would actually be interesting to test cases where a user would rather look
at a loading screen than an image attempting to distract from the loading or
vice versa.

Either way my main point was that _well designed and tested_ apparent fluff
that might lead to a tiny fraction of users abandoning searches before getting
a price could make up for it by encouraging [other] purchases. If there's a
time lag you may as well advertise in it. Consumers running exploratory
searches direct on an airline's website rather than via a comparison engine
you might not be that price sensitive anyway...

------
glesica
What? No. Why would you put a weird palm tree icon on a marker instead of the
price? I know it's warm in the Mediterranean, I'm not an idiot so please don't
treat me like one. Also, why does it matter where the user is located and what
the temperature is there? I know where I am (which, in many cases is different
from where I plan to fly out of) and I can probably figure out the local
temperature if I need to, which I don't when booking a flight.

Also, "icon-driven" navigation? In other words, confusing pictures that I have
to think about instead of clear text. Drop the icons and the interface
actually gets more minimalist (since the text is there anyway).

How in the world did design get to this point? It's like somebody decided that
the Internet was too convenient and efficient and asked a bunch of designers
to figure out ways to make it harder to use instead of fixing the _actual_
problems that exist... (an example of which would be the date dropdowns on
travel web sites, let me either select a date or type in a free-form date that
gets parsed smartly).

~~~
gazrogers
If I type in '02/03/2013' is that the 3rd of February or the 2nd of March?

~~~
codegeek
A good design will actually specify the format (mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy) or
just let you use a date picker/calendar. So no confusions there.

~~~
baby
I just want to note that only americans use the mm/dd/yyyy and that it's
pretty non-logical. So no problem outside the US.

~~~
minikites
Times and dates are already non-logical. 24 hours in a day but 7 days in a
week? Some months have more or less days than other months? Seriously?

[http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-
programm...](http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-time)

[http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-
pro...](http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-time-wisdom)

~~~
baby
I don't get how this is non-logical compared to what I said earlier. 24hour is
the same excuse as the empirical system, you can divide 12 by 2,3,4,6 thus it
makes things easier. It's a different system than the metric one, we could
have said that a day lasted 100hours and week 10days. It doesn't make it non-
logical though, it's like changing the basis.

But ordering makes things logical.

------
coldcode
No. I work for a travel company and not only does this not work but it is
likely illegal under DOT in the US. Using a map to pick is cutesy but
pointless as you might not even know where the hell you are going except by
name or airport code. I admit picking flights is rarely much fun except at
sites like Google and Hipmunk who do not book and are thus not limited by the
DOT and a wall of lawyers. Also GDS systems (and those airlines that handle
their own reservations) are slow as shit to do anything. Google manages to be
fast because it caches heavily producing really stale pricing and availability
which is not easy to overcome. You can have fast or you can have up to date
but you can't have both. Plus you have all the issues that everyone in the
industry hates everyone else and thus makes interoperability a pain in the
ass.

~~~
Ricapar
>> not only does this not work but it is likely illegal under DOT in the US.

Could you explain this a bit more? What law/regulation would make this
illegal?

As others have stated, the icon-heavy UI could use some work, but I'm having a
hard time seeing how that could violate anything.

~~~
ramses0
Preference-based display of flights (I'm thinking).

Once upon a time, AA owned SABRE and all the flight information was in the one
GDS (Global Distribution System). Then somebody at SABRE got the bright idea
to preference the order so AA flights were always on the first page and all
other airlines were on the second page. Most bookings were made from the first
page.

This was then made illegal and they said some gobbledy-gook like: "you can't
preference the display, you have to show a reasonable number of flights, all
in the same format, and sorted by time, price or duration".

Or something. I can't find a reference to it, but it had to do with SABRE's
virtual monopoly on global travel distribution (inventory, agents, etc) and
regulation / de-regulation of the travel industry.

------
snowwrestler
It's not hard to create beautiful layouts and cool interactions when one is
not constrained by real-world limitations, restrictions, users, budget, and
technologies.

In general I'm not a fan of this sort of splashy, spec or concept project. I
think it telegraphs that a company is not focused enough on real work, or at
least that they do not understand the crucial importance of constraints to
good design.

It reminds me of this rant about tech company "concept videos", which I very
much agree with (ignoring if possible the MS vs Apple minefield):

[http://daringfireball.net/2011/11/companies_that_publish_con...](http://daringfireball.net/2011/11/companies_that_publish_concept_videos)

~~~
restlake
It additionally reminds me of this particular agency's (f-i) previous HN
submissions and tagline plastered on all their pages ('we built the new USA
Today site, IMHO

------
untog
I hope not, that UI is infuriating to use. I know it isn't exciting or
glamorous, but the type-ahead dropdown thing everyone uses right now is used
for a reason- it works.

Even worse, this concept focuses entirely on airline websites for booking
travel. I think airlines need to work a lot harder on what happens after that-
the ability to easily look up baggage limits, airport info, checking in
online... all of these things are a lot more important than booking, which
most people don't even do on an airline's own site anyway.

------
Ricapar
This is what I want when I'm looking to plan a trip. Notice I said "trip", not
flight. Usually I don't care about my method of travel, I just want to get
from A to B to C in an efficient and affordable manner.

I live in Central NJ. Nearby me are several Amtrak and NJ Transit stations and
three major airports (EWR, JFK, and LGA). I have a car that can take me to any
of those places. I also have friedns that could drop me off at any of those
places as well. Plenty of options to depart from.

Let's say I want to visit some family in Florida. My final destination is also
abundant in transportation options. For Florida, I can land in Miami (MIA) or
Ft. Lauderdale (FLL) and be picked up in either one.

I usually end up fiddling around in Excel, planning out time and costs for
many different ways to get from A to B..

    
    
       EWR -> MIA
       EWR -> FLL
       JFK -> MIA
       FJK -> FLL
       ... etc ..
    

And to throw another wrench in the plan: dates. I could be planning a trip a
few months in advance (in hope that tickets are cheaper). Some sites really
struggle with the concept of having flexible travel dates. I want to be able
to say:

    
    
        "I want to leave from the general $HomeArea,
        go to $FinalDestination, +/- $x days of $date1,
        and come back +/- $y days of $date2."
    

I shouldn't be building my own OLAP cubes in Excel to not get screwed over on
rates.

But I've grown enough despise towards the travel industry that I'll happily
spend a few hours to make sure that I'm not paying them a penny more than I
have to.

~~~
smaccona
Have you tried ITA Matrix[1], now owned by Google? It's very powerful,
especially compared to the standard travel sites. A good intro can be found at
[http://www.50by25.com/2013/05/travel-tip-how-to-use-ita-
matr...](http://www.50by25.com/2013/05/travel-tip-how-to-use-ita-matrix.html).

[1] [http://matrix.itasoftware.com/](http://matrix.itasoftware.com/)

~~~
TeMPOraL
ITA Matrix is awesome; sad thing it doesn't seem to have data on cheap
airlines that operate in Europe (Ryanair, Easyjet, WizzAir, et al.), as they
tend to be used here most frequently.

------
nmcfarl
A clear example of Betteridge's law, "Any headline which ends in a question
mark can be answered by the word no."
-[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

Why? This is a pretty site that has a bunch of usability flaws making it
pretty useless for actually searching for flights. And all the other reasons
mentioned in this thread…

------
frisco
As a very frequent flier, I want more power tools, not prettier interfaces.
When I had the status on Delta, I ended up booking most of my tickets through
the Diamond Desk simply because they had tools that let us much more
efficiently search the itineraries I was interested in. For any given trip,
there are often many thousands of ways to fly it, with very complex trade-offs
between the options. Once you get to multi-city trips with things like open
jaws and stopovers, all hope is pretty much lost if you're trying to do it
without working with the airline.

What I really want is a text query interface to QPX without needing to be an
airline and pay seven figures for it. (That's not hiding somewhere in the
Matrix interface, is it?) Especially if I could cross-reference it with
flightaware's revenue and load data, which is super useful for things like
predicting upgrades. Kayak's nice, but it still takes hours to go through all
the options, flipping between the tabs. I don't really get Hipmunk.

TL;DR: Flight search is extremely complicated and these screen shots don't
cover any of the things I find difficult.

------
elif
A lot of negativity in the comments I think comes from a limited use-case.
Something like "I want to get from NYC to SFO in as few clicks as possible"

However, there is a different type of travel which is "I have a little extra
money sitting around, i'd love to travel"

When you don't have a predetermined destination, this interface is incredibly
useful.

~~~
glesica
But Kayak already has a really nice discovery interface...
[https://www.kayak.com/explore/](https://www.kayak.com/explore/)

In fact, I often use Kayak to figure out which airport I should fly into. For
instance, if I'm traveling through countries X, Y, and Z and I don't care what
order I visit them in, I can quickly check which one is the cheapest to fly
into.

------
emp_
Search interfaces seems to be stuck in the 90's too.

There are just so many problems with travel sites you can't possibly say it is
mainly an UX issue (well, you can since this is your business). What's really
soul-draining is spending hours looking for something, finding the perfect
thing (or surrender to the less awful one), filling a ton of information, put
your credit card in and be told that an 'unexpected error' or 'could not find
your flight'. Another thing is to be instantly notified of promotions, I have
just yesterday setup a IFTTT to send me a SMS if the RSS of a promotions
website updates, something these travel sites could sell for a sub if they
wanted to.

------
mkohlmyr
Personally when I'm looking for flights I'm not looking for travelling tips. I
don't need photos nor do I need any editorial. And a map is an unnecessarily
complex interface for what I do want to do.

I use Hipmunk for finding flights and I think it's a very functional product.
Far superior as a product to what I would find on an airlines website.

------
brandon272
I agree with the other comments made so far that the UI shown would be
frustrating to use from a functional standpoint. I believe the "perfect"
airline website would be something in between what is shown and what we have
today. Something similar to Airbnb in terms of a nice UI that makes finding
destinations and planning trips both functional and fun.

------
stef25
The UI is a nice show off experiment thing but the last thing you want from an
airline website.

------
terhechte
I travel a lot, and I can safely say that I don't like any of the current
solutions much. It always takes me a long time to find a good pleasing flight.
But their proposal doesn't really cut it, sadly.

------
lnanek2
Looks kind of annoying to use. I've usually searched out exactly what I want
on a price comparison site and want the airline site to shut up and give it to
me...

------
restlake
f-i, first and foremost, is an interactive agency, meaning they're all about
selling their 'next' project; this leads me to believe that the site is
probably a response to an RFP, or a really slick sales tool. As mentioned
previously, this is a nice proof-of-concept for cutting-edge web UI work and
interaction design (excusing obvious UX issues) that will '[sell] design
consulting', but that's about it

------
aaronbrethorst
> Is This The Future of The Airline Website?

I hope not, especially for visually impaired users, tablet or mobile users, or
just for general ease of use. It's way easier for me to type in a location's
name or airport code than try to figure out where it is on the map.

Here's an example: let's say I'm flying from Seattle-Tacoma (SEA) to Boston's
Logan Airport (BOS). On a normal travel site, I type in SEA<tab>BOS<return>.
Boom, done.

In this design, I'd somehow or another choose my origin, and then try to
figure out which of the many major airports in the Northeast I'm actually
looking for. My sense of geography of that area is pretty bad, so it would
likely take me a while to figure it out.

Or let's consider the reverse: flying to the Pacific-Northwest. If you're
zoomed out far enough, you're going to have a very small amount of distance
between Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland. I guess you'll need to zoom in far
enough to be able to visually differentiate them in order to drop the pin? OK,
but why not just type in "Vancouver", "Seattle" or "Portland"?

------
pierlux
This assumes that people know their geography.

------
snorkel
This flight path map would be a nice infographic next to the traditional
Leaving From/Going To web form, but it's not user friendly enough to be the
only UI available. Most adults can't even locate their destination cities on a
map.

------
cbhl
Being a big fan of AirBNB, Hipmunk, and GoPexo, I think this concept is really
exciting.

Unfortunately, I also think that it'll probably remain a concept for at least
the next five years.

One of the biggest PITAs with travel is getting accurate and comprehensive
flight and ticket information; with the exception of airlines running on
Google's ITA, I believe most airlines are running on systems built with
Fortran (and thus are difficult to interface with). While companies like Kayak
are making this information more accessible, I would be really surprised if a
real-world airline managed to build anything remotely like this any time soon.

------
Fuzzwah
As a "destination discovery" system, I think this would be ok. However, I'm
not really the target market. I already have ideas of where I would want to
travel to, I just don't have the time or the money. Seems that a site like
this is designed for someone who has the time and the money but not the
ideas.... First world problems.

Personally, if all airlines in the world would magically work with google
flights, I'd be happy.

------
junto
One area of booking flights that always annoys me is that I have to pick ONE
airport to fly from.

I live near to 3 good viable airports (within a 2 hour drive). I would like to
pick my preferred destination and select all 3 airports as start points, and
then let the algorithm find the best prices from all 3 airports.

They often have a "+/\- 3 days" option. They need a "+/\- X hours drive time
from LAT/LNG".

~~~
joeblau
Have you check out
[https://www.google.com/flights/](https://www.google.com/flights/) ? It's
similar to this concept, with fewer linear transformations.

~~~
junto
Sadly doesn't support my country yet, but yes, that is the kind of interface
I'm looking for.

------
pattle
We see this sort of thing a lot. Creating something pretty doesn't necessarily
give the user a nice experience. To be honest I've never found booking flights
that hard, I normally just use a comparison site and it works fine. Designs
like this seem a bit gimmicky and as book a flight normally involves spending
quite a bit of money that's the last thing I want to see.

------
baby
I thought this was real and was really really excited about it. I've been
traveling for a pretty long time and booking an airplane has always been an
annoying experience. Recently UI like Hipmunk and Adioso really changed a lot
and I'm really grateful that hackers have decided to improve on flight
research. If someone could do what f-i just did it would just be amazing.

------
rlpb
I don't think you can get away from Betteridge's law of headlines by avoiding
the question mark at the end of your question.

------
ccross59
In addition to all the other UI flaws this site has, I'm surprised nobody has
mentioned that the site itself is about 15 "pages" long. I gave up scrolling
after 30 seconds. I'm also very surprised that whoever designed the site
thought that was a good idea-- I feel like that's a pretty obvious design no-
no.

------
bgnm2000
Solving a non existent problem at its finest.

------
paulrademacher
The proper way to appreciate this website is with Van Halen's "Right Now" in
the background. Open this link in the background to see for yourself:
[http://grooveshark.com/s/Right+Now/3XdxpO](http://grooveshark.com/s/Right+Now/3XdxpO)

------
mvikramaditya
I'd rather that Airline Websites use their time in improving the usability of
their site by using autocomplete suggestions instead of drop-down lists of
hundreds of cities, save information in case of failed payments etc rather
than make the site beautiful but non-usable.

------
bruceb
Surprising how they made a nice UI but at the 1min mark they show eastern Asia
with the shades of yellow reversed. The land mass should be darker than the
ocean. It makes it look like the cities are on a land mass that is the shape
of the ocean.

------
chrismeller
Blah blah blah, people know where they want to go before they are booking a
damned flight, and Google Flights already lets you book them significantly
more easily and cheaper than a single airline.

If you want to compete with Zagats, do that.

------
owenjones
I drag the Destination Marker to a possible airport; a weather icon pops up
and a line with an airplane appears from Stockholm to wherever.

Thats it.

Is there something I'm missing? I don't think this is going to the be future
of Airline websites...

------
semiprivate
Maybe for the super rich, but the only way I'm switching off of kayak is if
you bring me cheaper flights.

All I want from a travel booking site is cheaper flights.

------
madfarmer
Wow Denmark is gone on that map :/

~~~
nimbix
And as far as I know, "Rijeka" airport is in Croatia, not in Reykjavik,
Iceland.

------
spotj
Pretty design doesn't mean good design. Hipmunk works fine.

