Nudge Travelers to Buy More

Flight booking is a daunting task based on whether you use airline mobile app like Singapore Airlines or an aggregator mobile app like Kayak or Clear Trip. A traveler must make a smart decision from hundreds of search results based on departure and arrival airports, connecting flights, airline carriers, layover time, number of stopovers, meals and many other criteria. Usually, traveler might informally consult friends/family/colleagues to get the best deal. And this consulting is time consuming. As the time ticks, ticket prices go up too, leading to an expensive trip.

Google Flights gives tips to travelers. It can be a date tip where tickets are available for cheaper prices on particular date or an airport trip where few airports are cheap to fly to. They also give a cabin tip, nudging you to fly Premium Economy class. While date tip and airport tip might lead to slight loss for them, they hope that they might make some money if travelers use the cabin tip.

Note that Google Flights offers cheaper prices for free, hoping to gain market share in the flight travel market, not to mention their acquisition of ITA Services a while ago.

What kind of tips do you offer your users?

Exception Handling in Unexpected Scenarios

Forgiving designs forgive users for mistakes and slips. Forgiving designs help users recover from error situations. Forgiving designs lead users to do the right thing.

Take a look at Lufthansa website. If flights are not available for the mentioned dates, users are asked to look at online flights timetable. A link to the online timetable is provided in the error message, reducing user effort. 

Forgiving designs not just delight the users, but also empower users to choose other ways to bring in revenue for your product.

How forgiving are your products?

Unsubscribe vs Leave

In today's world of information explosion, Unsubscribe is a term for respite for many users. The moment, we spot useless emails, we start hunting for that one word, Unsubscribe. It's a heavenly feeling sometimes. 

The term Unsubscribe although familiar to many, is hard to understand for many and need help to unsubscribe. In few cases, users might just block the sender. Why block when you can just unsubscribe?

NextBigWhat introduces a simpler term, Leave, a familiar word, easy to understand and act on it.

What's the word complexity in your products?

Who Is Who On Linked In?

If you have a fairly good online presence, few people may like your posts, be it on Facebook, Linked In, Twitter or other online media. As a human with decent online presence, you often get curious about who liked your stuff and then this happens.

On Linked In, photos of people are displayed in sequence. If you find a stranger's photo, and you need to know who he is, without re-directing to a new tab/page, you need to notice the URL in the browser status bar carefully.

Next time when you design similar feature in your product, do not force the user to be careful. 

Design carefully. 

Timely Feedback To Users While Loading Information

You want to book an appointment. You add potential list of attendees. Their availability is not shown instantly. You wait, and wait, and wait. 

MS Outlook 2013 changes that. While you wait, a message, We're checking everyone's calendars is displayed.

Products must be forgiving when 1)Users make mistakes and 2)Products make mistakes. 

MS Outlook does it. How about you?

Smart Defaults for Flight Passengers

When you start booking a flight ticket, it is obvious that at least 1 person is about to travel. Why ask the user to mention how many adults to start with?

Wego app defaults the passengers field to 1 Adult. Based on analytics data, apps can also change this number to 2 Adults or more. For e.g. if Ryan Air app knows, based on historical data that repeat users usually book as two adult passengers, they could default this value to 2. 

In few scenarios, the user might need to change the values, but that is okay as long as that percentage of users is too few.

What kind of smart defaults do you support?

Tea or Coffee? Affordances of Cups with Biscuit Pockets

You are at an important event. Networking is the most important thing for you. You hold cup and saucer in 1 hand while looking for your business card with the other. Your right-hand reaches out to the left side pocket or handbag. You then find a place to keep your cup and saucer, then go find the business card, go find the person who you wanted to hand it over to (who already lost eye contact with you) and then pick your cup back (if the waiter hasn't taken it away thinking you are done).

If you didn't have your breakfast and this is your first tea/coffee break, you would hope for some cookies. Now the saucer needs to hold your cup, spoon, biscuit. How easy is that?

A cup with a biscuit pocket could be your answer. This cup supports affordance by having a small pocket to hold biscuit, and in most cases, let people get away from holding the saucer, an unnecessary distraction.

It's hard to struggle with daily challenges as drinking tea/coffee at a large gathering. It's harder to solve these daily challenges.

What challenges are you thinking about today?

Movie Ticketing With Clear User Feedback

Booking movie tickets is a craze in countries like India where Cricket and Cinema are treated as Gods. BookMyShow is one such app. 

When a user starts booking movie tickets, the ticket status may change from time to time. Here is how BookMyShow does it.

When movie tickets are available in abundance, there is a green dot on the show time box. Tapping on it displays the Class Type, Availability, and the Price.

If movie tickets are filling fast and only few are left, an orange dot warns the user about it. Note that many mobile apps create a 'False Scarcity' situation by pushing most showtimes to the 'filling fast' bucket just to create scarcity and tempt users to book faster.

When the tickets are sold out, a red dot clearly tells the user that all tickets are gone and there is no use tapping on that showtime. 

Constant feedback to user on what is happening on the mobile app at that moment, hints the user that they are cared for, and their needs are taken care of.

What kind of feedback does your app offer?

Selecting Airports or Countries From a List

Programmers from the web world somehow thought that dropdowns solved many problems on mobile apps. As a result, many mobile apps have many dropdown fields to select from. A case in particular is the Airport / Country selection screens on flight booking apps.

A list of countries is displayed on the above screen. A user must scroll through the huge list for several seconds to select the country Yemen. 

Can we get better than this? Yes.

How?

Here is how.

Flio app simplified the Airports selection list by placing alphabets on the right side of the screen. A user can select Yemen by tapping on the alphabet Y, and then select Yemen.

This is much faster and delightful than the previous one.

What do you think?

Where Is My Seat?

Frequent flyers face one consistent challenge - Where Is My Seat on the flight? With online check-ins and seat maps, remembering the seat number and position sounds simple, until the point you start boarding the flight.

A dedicated flight crew member reads your seat number from boarding pass and tells you to take a specific row to look for your seat. Add to this, different flight types like wide-body / narrow body. Any layman's understanding of seat maps disappears into darkness.

KLM Airlines long ago, designed a boarding pass that indicates your seat number plus tells you the exact location of your seat, withoug confusing you with alphabets and complicated window/aisle symbols. When you board your flight, this is exactly what you need. This solution delights the customer plus saves time for crew members who can now greet the passengers, without leaving a long queue of passengers behind.

Do you know where your seat is?