We've done a lot of travel site design, for companies including EasyJet, Hotels.com, National Express East Coast. In honour of World Usability Day's transport theme this year, we've pulled together eight design and usability tips from our travel-related ethnographic research and usability testing.

1. Support multi-variable trade-offs

Some people prioritise the cost of the ticket whilst others prioritise the time of travel. The type of trip will cause a person to prioritise one of those variables over the other, but most booking journeys involve trading off these two factors. Successful travel booking interfaces help people understand how time and cost influence each other.

For a holiday maker, the choice of location, duration and hotel make the activity even more complex. "I can go to Rhodes from Manchester on the 16th for 300 pounds, and stay in the four star excelsior for 7 nights, or Cyprus from Gatwick on the 19th for 312 pounds and stay in the 5 star Grand for 6 nights." These are really complex decisions, made in conjunction with family or friends, so you'll need to pull out all the stops to design an interface that really helps.

2. Present a well-defined proposition

Trying to be all things to all people is very expensive. Players with a tightly-defined target market will always do better at serving their market than generalised players spread thin over lots of markets.

Know your market and offer a proposition that appeals to that market - whether it's group travel, business travel, family holidays, design hotels, skiing etc. Then build a site that profoundly and accurately addresses those people's behaviours and needs.

3. Fight "search fatigue" - catch people early in the decision process

People are overwhelmed with choice in the travel market. On average, people in our research visited 22 sites before deciding to go with a provider which they visited 2.5 times. By making site that supports people early in the decision making process and helps them fast track the exploration and decision process, you create awareness in people's mind and they are more likely to go with you.

4. Surface the right information to help people make a decision

Choosing hotels is hard. People find it difficult and stressful to make decisions when their criteria are flexible and the field is large.

Good pictures, features, location with map, star rating, Trip Advisor rating, price per room/night (not per person), hotel name and short description are what matters most when sifting through lists of hotels. Enabling people to get this information without having to 'pogostick' is vital.

5. Focus on selling the experience not the product

Beyond the basic factors above, there's a whole list of things that users want to know before they make a decision. Focussing on the experience of staying in a hotel, rather than the generic factors, makes it easier for people to make that final choice.

For example, a hotel in Paris is not just a "3 star hotel in the city centre". It's a fantastic base in the vibrant Place de la Sorbonne, it's ideal for food lovers with 6 gourmet bistros, it captures the image of Paris with its view of the Eiffel Tower, it's ideal for families or ideal for romantic getaways. Understanding what a stay there will be like is what will help people to decide and to buy.

6. Be transparent and honest

Trust is a major sticking point for travel sites. In our research, users rarely trusted the price shown and were always prepared for some last minute surcharges.

Travel sites want to show low prices (excluding as many elements as possible), because they believe it help buyers get started. The flip side: a slippery and arduous booking process repels buyers (one where surcharges slowly build up, and cross-sells appear in your basket uninvited).

Would giving the real prices transparently build reputation and trust that exceed the pulling power of a low offer? No one knows for sure. We do know that removing some of the automatic cross-sells does produce a short term loss of revenue. But whether it offers a long term boost in loyalty, no one has yet had the guts to find out.

7. The seducible moment comes after the sale.

When people go into low-cost flight booking mode, they are very task-focussed and don't really care about anything else. We think that's a learned behaviour coming from the situation that a) the good flight deals go fast b) they need to concentrate to make sure they get rid of insurance etc.

Low cost flight booking is like bargain hunting, and trying to up-sell users during the booking process is like taking the bargain away from them. The seducible moment for up-sell is not really during the flight booking process, but after. Most travel sites are stuck in the business model of trying to up-sell during the booking process.

8. Ensure localisation is an actual part of the design phase.

The most planned and least actualised design stage is LOCALISATION. Lack of effective internationalisation and localisation is costing travel sites money.

There's a myth that Europe offers a unified culture with different languages, but it's not true. Language, rating systems, research, booking and payment behaviour vary significantly from country to country.

A simple example: some cultures will tend to assume that a rating of 1 is the best rating, others that a rating of 5 is the best. (The solution is to use a visual rating scale which is less ambiguous).

To maximise adoption, conversion and revenue, travel sites need to research, and test internationally. Using design skills from a range or different countries helps too.

A market opportunity: Design the next generation of travel sites.

People have very quickly learned how to dodge the failings of one website by jumping to another. In our research we have seen that people have no loyalty, there is no trust and that means that online travel companies will always have a major element of uncertainty in their future.

But the development of the web shows that people are open to new ideas and new ways of doing things. So we urge travel companies to innovate based on these design tips. Come up with the iPhone of the online travel industry. The opportunity is there for the taking.

Thanks to Louise, Peter, Karl, Lola, SimonJ, Ofer, Claire and Alejandra for the research and insights.

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It's World Usability Day on 13th November, and the theme is transport. User- and customer- experience design for public transport is a huge, multi-facetted topic, and one which we're fascinated by at Flow. In fact, Flow is sponsoring the UPA's London meeting, so that people can talk about it over a beer.

For the blog, though, we'll just confine ourselves to a simple report about the customer experience of a Eurostar trip from one of our UX consultants, Simon Johnson. Happy World Usability day!

 

Fellow travellers,

Has anyone noticed how poor crowd management is at Eurostar?

The instructions for which line you should stand in are positioned at the wrong end of the line. It's not until you join a queue and proceed to the front that you are informed that you are in the in/correct line. Of course this causes all sorts of tension as people realise they need to move over into another queue - committing a social faux pas by now being forced to get in front of others.

The whole experience is littered with insufficient staff, lack of clear guidance, ad-hoc A4 print-outs with make-do instructions, broken ticket machines, stressed people. At both ends there is no system for separating those booked for immediate departure and the hundreds of punters who have arrived early for the later train.

The coach numbers printed on the platform are so worn out so it's difficult to read them. It won't be long before they have disappeared altogether. The coaches are numbered in dark grey on a muddy LCD grey backgrounds in small text.

A great deal of the overcrowding is due to the fact that Eurostar allocated so much room for after-check-in shopping. However, the opportunity to buy anything is zero, as they only allow you to check-in when your train is ready to depart. As a result, the retail area is empty of customers, while the waiting area is crowded with unhappy customers. Mais alors!

In the 21st century with years of breakthroughs in ergonomics, logistics, psychology, usability, crowd management, human factors, etc. and €billions, couldn't Eurostar have foreseen these problems? Moreover, now this problems are horribly evident, why aren't they being addressed tout de suite? Wasn't the Eurostar team packed with 'experts' touting university degrees from esteemed colleges? Quite frankly my mother could have done a better job, no kidding.

Simon

......

Take a look: Flow has made a real difference to the experience of planning and booking travel for companies like EasyJet, Transport for London, and National Express East Coast, Lastminute.com and Hotels.com.

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Humans are not very good at predicting what will make us happy in the future. Designers need user centred design techniques to help them to overcome that limitation.

We don't know what's good for us

In Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, describes recent research on "prospection" - the act of considering the future. Our ability to simulate future experiences is one of the things that makes us human. But our experience simulator (the pre frontal cortex) makes lots of mistakes. A key mistake is to imagine the future will be like the present.

For example, past visions of the future included rocket cars and jet packs, but usually the people's behaviour didn't change a bit. Mom still hung out in the kitchen, even though the work was being done by machines. And people lived happily in high-rise, concrete complexes. Today, retro-futuristic visions are more a quaint commentary on the time when they were made than a relevant description of the present.

On an individual level, we're bad at predicting what experiences will make us happy in our own future. After finishing a delicious roast duck dinner at a favourite restaurant, I will be full and I will have "habituated" to the duck. So future duck dinners will not seem so appealing to me. If asked to pre-order for my next visit in a month's time, I'm more likely to choose something other than duck. But when I arrive at the restaurant a month later, I am more likely to actually choose the duck again. When I made the choice about my future, I assumed it would be like my present, where I'd had enough of the duck. But when the future came, I was actually hungry - a frame of mind that I did not predict.

Methods for predicting the future

On a straightforward level, designers need to make this prediction: "What will people want to do with this product?" For example...

• Will people want to shop on my website by brand, price or by specification?
• Will people want to devote full attention to this mobile device or just glance at it?
• Will people want to watch a 30-second animated intro to my website?
• Will people want to click a button to clear all the data from a web form ans start again?

In all these real-life situations, the designers had to imagine future usage of their product and make decisions accordingly. A lot of them got things wrong, because they imagined that when using the finished product in the future they would be in the same frame of mind as when they were designing it.

Since we're actually better at thinking about the present than the future, designers who want robust results need to bring the future into the present. In some respects, that's what user centred design is.

• Ethnographic studies: Since target users are (usually) human they can't predict accurately what will make them happy in the future. So it's best to watch what people do instead. Study what makes them happy, and what unhappy moments you can address with design.
• Iterative prototyping: The future product isn't finished yet. But make a mock-up of it and get target users to try it out. By simulating real usage, you're simulating the future more accurately than you can imagine it.
• Scenarios and cognitive walkthroughs: Be methodical and write down what people's future situations might be. Then you've got a better chance of predicting their future behaviour.
• Field trials: For particularly huge and life-changing ideas, your prototypes need to be a bit more solid. Leave them with a select few for a while and see what you get. For example, Microsoft's SenseCam and whereabouts clock. Or Bill Gaver's Flight tracker.

Making future happiness evident

Designers are often asked to design things that look desirable - that convince people to buy, rather than to deliver ongoing satisfaction. In a way, the user experience design movement has been about changing that: creating products that actually make people happy over time.

But since our customers can't predict what will make them happy, they might buy the wrong thing. Something with lots of impressive-looking buttons, for example. So not only does the product have to make people happy, it has to look like it will make them happy.

One trick is to emphasise simplicity (which is what seems to make most people happy) as a feature. Sometimes it works.

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