Kayak - an example of good design
It’s one of those times. You know, when you are trying to figure out where to go for vacation, and your biggest variable is the cost of an airline ticket. So what do you do? you start tediously plugging in destinations and various departure dates trying to get ballpark figures for how much things cost.
It sucks
It’s really quite painful. Well at least it was.
I happen to like good design. Especially good web design (not surprising since I design many complicated web interfaces for a living) so when I stumbled across a link to Kayak I wanted to share a few awesome ways they have implemented features that seem tedious on other airline sites. But of course this sat in my unpublished blog posts folder for a month until I noticed that Mark Hurst of goodexpericence.com also praised Kayak for their good user experience.
So what is it that’s amazing? pictures tell a thousand words.
Date Selection
When you allow Kayak to look for prices at dates before/after your departure/return date, you can then filter those out easily. The main section of the page updates immediately with the filtered set of flights.
Flight Times
You can do almost the same thing to adjust flight times, if say you can’t leave till 3pm just slide the slider. No text fields, no dropdowns, just slide and the results are filtered right away
Nearby Airports
And my favorite is that if you check a box on the initial search saying that you are happy to leave from a different airport or go to a different airport, you can still filter those out (which is also a nice way of finding out what airports are near). In this case it makes it easy to decide that i would rather leave only out of some of the nearby airports.
Good Design, Good Site.
And they do all that for hotels, and cruises, and more.
But don’t take my word for it, check out Kayak for yourself.
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I liked it so much, the link above is an affiliate link. I have no problem promoting their site.
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