Air fare calendar when you modify your search Hrush
When we released an updated Cleartrip Calendar, we rewrote all of the underlying code as well. In addition to having the new calendar support a few more features, one of our key goals was to make the data and calendar-based results more portable so that we could easily reuse them in multiple places on our site.
The first place we started reusing the calendar data was in some of our email communications with customers. Now, we’re happy to announce that the air fare calendar is available within our main flight search results as well.
We went through some interesting discussions around how to include the calendar display in our main search results. Some of us wanted to make it available by default as an alternative view to the list-based display of search results. Others weren’t quite convinced that presenting it as an alternate view was the best approach.
We kicked around quite a few ideas for placement before settling on what we think is the perfect contextual placement–next to the search form in the “Modify your search” block. It’s one of those things that’s just so obvious in hindsight that it makes you want to slap your forehead really, really hard.
Users go to modify their search when they want to compare prices with a different date(s), and by putting the calendar there, we give them a wide range of dates and fares on the spot. The placement is also a win in terms of screen real estate–before we put the calendar in, there was a huge chunk of white space there that always looked a little odd; we’re glad to see it finally filled up usefully.
We’re big believers in the power of using context to approach design. We think the placement of the fare calendar within the modify search provides additional information that is highly relevant to a user’s search context and lets users easily identify the best dates for them to fly without having to conduct multiple searches. We hope you find this addition to our search results useful.
In my humble opinion this calendar-based search is far more ‘usable’ when you are flexible on the dates of travel than your current method of providing tabs for one day prior and forward on the search results.
Would be great if you could consider providing a 7 day view for flexible date searches that looks like the calendar, with additional tools like your great timings slider bars and airlines filter list.
Dhruv–we don’t disagree, but this view does come with one big problem in that it limits the amount of flights and information that we can provide at a glance.
Our standalone Calendar and Graph tools come with airline filtering and both of them offer up to 5 weeks at a glance:
* http://www.cleartrip.com/calendar
* http://www.cleartrip.com/graphs
Then maybe a simple link somewhere on the interface to view the entire month at a time would suffice. All I’m saying is you have the best interface available for searching through flexible dates, but that interface is hidden from view when a user actually tells you that s/he is flexible on dates.
Dhruv–that’s good suggestion, we’ll see what we can do here.
Whoa! Direct ripoff from http://kayak.com and http://sidestep.com