The first thing I noticed about the Kayak iPhone application is the nice big button approach.  When I used to develop software applications for board level blue chip executives we used to call this the ‘Fisher Price’ approach – large and obvious buttons ‘Press Here’ – nothing too complicated!

In addition to any highflying businessperson’s immediate travel requirements – a place to sleep, a flight and a car there are some useful extras too. 

There’s an option to email my itinerary emails to Kayak.  I did this with an old Ryan Air itinerary I had and within seconds that overly lengthy email stuffed full of regulations and other uninteresting stuff was translated into key information accessible via the app with the option to look at a map of my destination and check the ‘live’ status of my flight. Great.  Now all we need are airlines like Ryan Air to bring their systems into the 21^stCentury so that I don’t have to bring printed boarding passes (on paper!!!) to the airport with the threat of 30 years hard labor in Siberia if I forget.

 I invented a one-day trip to Bangkok for next week to check the UI for searching and booking flights.  Again, I’m presented with a beautifully simple interface and after pressing search the results appear in addition to an obvious progress bar indicator showing me exactly how the search is progressing. 

Once all in the results are presented in the default ‘by cost’ order, there are some great filters and sort functions that allow me to further exclude certain airlines and flights with more than one stop etc.  Again, all this is beautifully intuitive and simply presented to me and, as a novice user, there’s no real concept of ‘learning’ this application.

Clicking through on the Tiger Airways flight gives me a summary of the itinerary.  Selecting ‘book now’ inevitably ends up taking me through to the Tiger Airways site to complete the booking – from big button nirvana through to ‘too much information for a browser page on an iPhone’ hell.  Anyway, people who know much more about this than I do are hopefully working on clever API’s and UI’s to resolve this.

The hotel search already knew when I needed the hotel from the flight search dates.  Obvious really – but it’s amazing how many application and web interfaces neglect to incorporate sensible little bits of coding like this. 

Similar filters and sorts are available to me.  Selecting one of the hotel options gives me some tabs with exactly the kinds of things I might want to quickly know – some photos of the rooms, a map and some reviews.  Perfect.  Selecting the ‘book’ button takes me through to an ‘Agoda’ booking page with text about one pixel high, 15 more photos and all sorts of other nonsense.  I pressed ‘book’ NOT ‘I want even more info’.  Anyway, where are those clever people again when we need them?

The car rental section works in a similar way to flights and hotels.

There are some great other sections.  Price alerts allows me to get specific price information on an upcoming route I’m interested in.  And I’m delighted to see a ‘packing list’ section.  Being a borderline OCD weirdo I already have these lists in Evernote and several other places so being able to have them again in Kayak keeps me happy and stops some of my shakes.

A couple of directories and an Airport Information section complete this beautifully simple application that is a joy to use.

However, it highlights the two distinct development tracks of the interwebs – the simple and beautifully designed mobile application development of the last few years contrasts dramatically with the information rich ‘designed for big screen – almost unreadable on a mobile device’ web pages we have to dip into to complete bookings.

Last call for those clever people to fix this, please.