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?