The Yahoos must be so relieved...

We recently added new slider controls to Cleartrip's search filters.

Along with the new sliders, we made another small, but significant addition to our hotel search filters--the ability to filter the results by entering the name of the hotel you're searching for.

It always seemed irksome to us that if you knew exactly what hotel you wanted to book, you'd still have to resort to sorting the hotels by name and then clicking around till you found that specific hotel in the result set.

Enter the hotel name filter--now you can enter all or part of your preferred hotel's name into a text box. The result set is instantly narrowed down to display only those hotels matching what you entered in the text box.

We don't think that finding the perfect hotel should be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And it certainly shouldn't be harder when you already know exactly which hotel you want and just need to book that hotel. This change makes it easy for you to find and book exactly the hotel you're looking for.

This is one more example of a small change that has a big impact. We're big believers in paying attention to all the little things that add up to making a big difference. A recent example of a little change that had a big impact is airlines flying slower to save fuel costs

Southwest Airlines started flying slower about two months ago, and projects it will save $42 million in fuel this year by extending each flight by one to three minutes

Since Cleartrip launched, we've had top-of-the-line search filters that allow you to adjust your flight and hotel search results so that you can make the perfect choice with just a few extra clicks and instant updates to the results. There was a little something that our filters were missing--you guessed it, slider controls.

We've had a lot of requests from users for sliders and earlier today, we launched a new version of our search filters with the sliders. The image below provides a before and after look at our flight filters--the old filter is on the left and the new one on the right with the sliders highlighted.

We use the slider for all filtering that involves a range of values, for instance, price range or departure and arrival time ranges. The sliders are a nice improvement over the dropdown menus we had previously--they surface the underlying information immediately without forcing you to hunt through a list of values.

In addition to surfacing information quickly, the sliders provide very precise control in specifying the range of values that are acceptable to you. It's now very easy to say that you only want to see flights that depart between 10:30 am and 11:30 pm.

Cleartrip's air search features sliders for price, departure time and arrival time; the hotel search has a slider for price.

We hope you love the new sliders--we're always looking for ways to improve your searching and booking experience.

Last month we released a completely redesigned Cleartrip date picker.

The new date picker attracted a fair amount of commentary, with the loudest bits of feedback focused on three items:

1. The date picker widget was too large, taking up too much screen space
2. The distinction between weekdays and weekends was too weak, making it hard to tell them apart
3. The colours were perceived to be a little too flat

Armed with those three pieces of feedback, we set out to tweak the date picker. To begin with, we made a 15% reduction in the amount of space the date picker occupies by reducing font size and spacing.

Turning our attention to separating weekdays and weekends, we brightened the background colour for weekdays and lightened the text colour used for weekend dates. We also changed to a black background for your selected date as it provides a higher contrast. Finally, we made any control icons invisible when they're not clickable--previously they were visible, but greyed out.

Voila. With that, we wrap up our spit and polish sessions on the date picker for the moment--we hope you like it even more now. We have a few more ideas for improvements, but they'll have to wait a little bit.

In the fourth and final instalment of this series, we leave you with the Golden Rule of repelling users--*There is no room for white space on your site*.

Website real estate is very, very expensive--it costs by the pixel. Remember the million dollar website where each of the million pixels on the home page, was sold for a dollar by some college kid we all envy? So, don't waste space! Stick some information, button or graphic in every available square inch.

It does not matter if there is no logical structure or flow to your site, present the information in any random order that comes to mind. Who cares anyway? Unrelated items (e.g. Epaper , Live cricket score and feedback,) all belong next to each other. These items are positioned right next to Khalid-o-scope, another very similar item.

Disclaimer: All opinions expressed above are those of the author alone and not of Cleartrip or any of Cleartrip's employees.

Facebook may dub itself a "utility," but Facebook users are voting with their installed applications. And the writing on the wall just became a lot clearer--just for fun:

Thanks to FlowingData for the illuminating graph. It should be interesting to see how billions of dollars in valuation are justified for something that most people use for a lark.

The third rule of repelling users is Make them hunt for information on the site, and make the information difficult to access.

Use small fonts that need a magnifying glass for adults with normal 20/20 vision to read. Boxes which pop into vision, and which then proceed to disappear as soon as the mouse is moved are also useful.

If the information is a ten digit mobile number, small fonts may not be enough--make it scroll across the page so it is impossible to figure out or note down the number in one go. It should vanish off the edge of the screen before the user can jot it down and then re-appear on the opposite side. Have at least three to four different numbers for different activities all scrolling in a single line. That way, the user keeps waiting for what he wants, but continues to miss it.

Give users choices they can't understand. Make sure they have to click to find out that they have gone to the wrong place. Vague words like "business transformation," "collaboration," "transmission" are great because they can mean anything, everything and nothing. Remember Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland -- "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

In the fourth and final instalment of this series, we'll be taking a look at the golden rule of user repulsion.

Disclaimer: All opinions expressed above are those of the author alone and not of Cleartrip or any of Cleartrip's employees.

We've said it before -- Design is not Art. I came across a recent piece of "art" that has me thanking the powers that be for making designers a different breed from artists.

Costa Rican artist, Guillermo "Habacuc" Vargas, recently put a starving dog on display in an art gallery as a work of art entitled Eres Lo Que Lees (You are what you read). The dog, a stray captured from the streets of Managua, Nicaragua, was kept on a short leash in the gallery and deprived of food and water. As if that weren't bad enough, the title of the "exhibit" was written on the wall of the gallery in dog food.

It's unclear whether the dog is dead or alive, but that almost seems besides the point--what gives this so-called artist the right to abuse animals for his "art?" The Costa Rican authorities are nonchalant--they've selected Vargas to represent the country in an upcoming art exhibit, the “Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008." There's an online petition to have Vargas banned from the Bienal.

When it comes to design, purpose and function are a necessity. For art, purpose and function are optional. Art is free to be pointless, cruel and inhuman. Thank God, then, that design is not art.

In Part 1 of How to repel users, we highlighted the first rule of repelling users--Stop (or at least delay) users from getting into your site. In this post, we'll examine how to repel those users that manage to make it past your site's defences.

The second rule of user repulsion is Overwhelm them with info. When applying this rule, start with the home page and leave no stone unturned in cramming the page with all the bits and pieces that are important to you; your users will be lost in the blink of an eye, with no clue where to start.

Display lots of unrelated banner ads, for instance, travel ads on a financial website are a great idea--after all, that's why someone comes to a investment portal, to book a flight ticket. This is a particularly useful tip, especially when combined with the information overload mentioned above.

Making sure critical parts of the site, like user login or registration, are incompatible with some browsers and, therefore, don't always display properly.

Finally, make sure your error messages are completely unintelligible to users--this is also a highly effective way of intimidating them into never coming back.

Disclaimer: All opinions expressed above are those of the author alone and not of Cleartrip or any of Cleartrip's employees.

People call meetings or send emails at the drop of a hat. Agendas, subjects and communication are often half-baked. Most often, people call meetings or send emails because they need answers. Most professionals are complaining about reeling from lowered productivity due to meeting and email overload, so I think it merits trying to get to the root cause of unnecessary meetings and email.

This comment on the 43folders blog nails it:

I find that the people who work for me will, if I’m available, use asking me something as a substitute for thinking (this I’ve learned after years of being instantly available and then wondering why the people working for me don’t seem to be developing critical thinking skills).

It's always easier to call meetings or send an email when you need answers that other people might have, but we should pause to think about the impact that disruption has on the productivity and focus of others.

Very often, answers can be found with a little thinking--without necessarily involving other people. Asking someone else may be easy, but it won't teach you how to think.