In my own studies, people are surprisinly competent using search engines like Google. I think 50% of participants found an answer in the first 10 results they got for queries they formatted themselves. However, I can't think of anything specific to your question, so sorry about that.
Another important thing IMHO is to format the results well enough to make it obvious to the user what they are looking through. If the data being searched through are strictly formatted (which for travel, I guess they are), then it should be possible to make a returns page with a good summary of each returned item. Eg: From: London, UK; to: Paris, France Depart: 0630 Heathrow 5 July 2008, arrive 0700 Charles de Gaulle 5 July 2008 (90 minutes) Return: 1755 Charles de Gaulle 19 July 2008, arrive 2025 Heathrow 19 July 2008 (90 minutes) This lets me have enough information to decide whether it is suitable or not (no way! 0630 is far too early to leave!). One problem might be working out dates. Some people want to travel on specific dates, but you would have to parse these well and make guesses (eg, "flight and hotel london to paris 5 Jul 2009 to 19 July 2009" - a human can understand it easily but a machine would find it harder to reliably understand and not return flights from Paris to London and then back). Testing which fields should be shown would be a relatively easy task to test for. I would guess it depends upon the context of the search (eg, if the user searched for locations and dates, then the user probably wants to see them more than the carrier). That would be a nice little project. I would be interested in hearing how it turns out. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=31770 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
