Hipmunk needs to ramp up on usability

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.

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.

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

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

Great to see your thoughts.

1. Sorting by agony: I'm glad to hear that this feature is useful for some folks. But why do I have to go to the FAQ page to understand what Agony is? Do you really believe mainstream users would go and read FAQs before buying products? The benefit of sorting by "Agony" must be explicit on the results page itself. How to make it explicit is something the UI designers at Hipmunk need to think about.

2. From $639: When I'm walking by a store and my wife points me to a sign that says "dresses from 99$", the sceptic in me reminds her that there are probably just a few dresses that are priced $99(maybe just 1?). The rest are probably priced at 199 or 299 or even 2599. We sometimes still end up going in and buying something, but are very aware that the "From" is deceiving.

Or when we see a sign that says "Discount upto 60%" where the fontsize of the "Discount upto" part is 20 and the "60%" part is 1000. We know there could be just one item that has a 60% discount. We are skeptical.

When a user sees "From 200$" on Hipmunk, the same flag is raised. I'd say, just remove the "From". As long as they get at least one flight at that price, they're not going to complain. Why confuse users with an extra confusing word?

3. Picking flight legs separately: I'm not sure what the basis is of labeling this an edge case. I search for flights, Hipmunk presents me with onward options. At this stage, I have zero visibility into what return options I have for each flight shown. How would you find out the return options? By selecting each individual flight in turn and going to the choose return flight page. That sounds like a lot of potential back and forths (read clicks!) to me. We all know what increasing the number of clicks does to conversion numbers on ecommerce websites.

I'm not saying being able to pick legs has no benefit. I'm arguing that this is not the most common use case users care about. A business traveler who has enough time and doesn't have to worry about prices would probably love this feature. But that doesn't sound like the mainstream user to me. And if I were Hipmunk, my target would be mainstream users who aren't the most patient. Think bounce rates? :)

4. We might be talking of different things here. my fourth point was about flight durations, I'd like to know how long a flight is. Hipmunk just shows a strip between vertical time markers are spaced 4 hours apart. To find out the duration: (a) I have to hover over the flight (2) I need to do a quick calculation in my head of how long a flight is that departs at 6 am PST and lands at 4.35 PM PST. Not easy.

Flight durations are important: they indicate how long I'm stuck on a flight.

6. How common is the use case of a person searching for more than 1 flight at the same time? Say, you were looking for a weekend flight from SFO to Boston. What added benefit would you get from opening two tabs?

I'm open to the notion that folks might want to run parallel searches. I just don't understand the logic or benefit of doing it. Please educate me :)

I think Hipmunk is quite promising. I wrote this when it came out: http://www.dpsmiles.org/blog/2010/08/19/hipmunk-a-review/

My problem is: I keep telling my wife I like Hipmunk, but when it's time to book a flight, I end up going to the somewhat ugly but really easy to use Kayak. That should ring an alarm bell for Hipmunk: when well wishers praise your product but never use it. So I could have very well titled my blog post "Why I love Hipmunk but never use it.."