User interface design in travel may be ripe for innovation, but it’s a potential minefield, as SIA discovered.
But flight ticketing startup Flocations is stepping into the breach with a unique UI designed for price-sensitive leisure travelers.
Flocations uses a map as its primary interface, with markers showing destinations within a certain radius defined by a price ceiling. Hovering your pointer over each marker shows you the price. Clicking on the marker shows you another layer of details, including the airline, time of flight, airport and links to other flights and hotel searches.
“We want to make it dead simple for users to plan their leisure travel,” said Flocations’ UI designer and co-founder, Florian Cornu, in response to e-mailed questions.
Flocations is slick and the map interface delivers immediate visual impact. The idea, Cornu said, is to create an interface that helps to “inspire” leisure travelers by providing them with a price ceiling and destinations.
“No need for them to be hindered by tedious destination searches using several booking sites,” he said. “We try to simplify that process by giving users a visual representation of where their dollars can take them.”
Cornu says the service is at a very early stage and that the map interface is just one of the ways Flocations will present information. He says the team plans to start monetising Flocations with hotel affiliate programs.
Flocations is built by a quartet, including Cornu, who met at the Singapore franchise of the global business lovefest Startup Weekendin May. The team ended up with a prototype when the event ended, and continued work on it for three months, launching at the end of August.
Users have responded favourably to Flocation’s premise of delivering “travel inspiration” so far. Preetam Rai, a technologist and frequent short-haul flyer based in Singapore, said Flocations’ UI works for him because it focuses on his budget instead of his destination.
“I can find out the prices immediately via their UI. Compare this to opening multiple browser windows for the various budget airlines and then running the search one by one,” he said. “Flocations is now my first stop to look for inexpensive trips.”
But Aen Tan, a noted user interface designer in Singapore, thinks the Flocations UI may not work for the vast majority of travelers.
“I believe users are used to using sites like Wego and Zuji,” he said. “To the average user, [Flocations is] confusing and therefore has perceivably less credibility.”
Tan said the UI needed more icons and symbols to help users find features, and that a map would always load slower than text-field. He also pointed out that Kayak does a better job of using a map for flight bookings by plotting a destination’s price on the map, among other things.
But both Tan and Cornu agree on one thing. Innovative UI design is badly needed in the travel space and one startup has got it in spades: Hipmunk. The flight-booking site trades on its “agony-free” UI built around flight times and its Y Combinator alumni founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian.
“Maybe that will be the two main sites travelers will use from now: Hipmunk when the destination is known, Flocations for leisure travel,” Cornu said.
Note: Flocations will be one of the teams pitching during the WIT Start-Up Gallery at the WIT Bootcamp on Oct 17.
