A picture says a thousand words, so, much like the last time, we created a cool infographic to share with our internal teams. This is a mildly censored version of the poster we released internally – it highlights the impact of SEO on our traffic and some important changes in our natural search rankings.

We experienced a 205% increase in the total visits acquired from organic non-branded keywords, with a 103% increase in the percentage contribution from 9.2% to 18.7%. Considering the diminishing real estate space for purely organic listings in Google’s search results, we weren’t expecting anywhere near this drastic an improvement.

We’re thrilled with the progress we’ve made and we’ll be sharing more in the future as we can.

This system of 50 symbol signs was designed for use at the crossroads of modern life: in airports and other transportation hubs and at large international events. They are an example of how public-minded designers can address a universal communication need.

One of the most effective artifacts of communication today, these pictograms have over the years assisted millions of travellers of different ages and cultures. It’s an inspiration for anyone in the field of information design. The sheer simplicity of these pictograms is what makes them so timeless and universally accepted.

At Cleartrip, we draw a lot of inspiration from things that we find useful and the DOT set of pictograms has always had a huge influence on our fundamental approach to design. When it came time to pick icons for our core products we didn’t have to look elsewhere. It was like finding the perfect mate.

Here’s how we’ve been using the DOT pictograms across different Cleartrip products:

These pictograms were originally designed to be used in signage at large sizes, however, some of them take a hit on sharpness and fidelity when used in digital products. The problem gets more acute as the icons are scaled down to 24px or 16px. Of the lot, the one icon we’ve always struggled with is the icon used to represent hotels. Here’s how the original hotel icon scales down.

It looks fairly muddy at it’s smallest size. The only way to retain sharpness at smaller sizes was to find an icon with fewer details. While exploring alternatives, we first tried using a hotel icon from the cartographic symbols commissioned by the American National Park Service. We worked it into our icon navigation to see if it fared better than the DOT pictogram:

The visual weight of hotel icon is not entirely proportionate to the weight of the flight and train icons. Also, it didn’t have the character of the original DOT pictogram. We weren’t happy with this icon, but it planted a seed in our mind in terms of the direction we needed to take.

We started tweaking the original DOT pictogram. Inspired by the icon we sourced from The Noun Project, we got rid of all the unnecessary details — the foot board, the separation of the blanket and rounded corners at the bottom and designed our own icon. This is the new icon we created, scaled to various sizes:

For use in our primary navigation we sharpened all the icons up a little further by adding subtle gradients and inset shadows. This is a comparison of all the three icons in our navigation:

We’ve tried our best to adapt the original pictogram and optimise it for desktops and smaller mobile device screens, while retaining its character so it continues to be easily recognisable. We’re thrilled with the output — we think it looks and works great.

Note: At the time of going to press, the new hotel icon and visual treatment are only live on our blog; we will be rolling them out across the board over the next few days.

“What we found a long time ago was the line of code that a developer can write the fastest, the line of code that a developer can maintain the cheapest and the line of code that never breaks for the user is the line of code the developer never had to write.”
~ Steve Jobs

From a Steve Jobs presentation in 1997 where Jobs discusses Object Oriented Programming.

[via Daring Fireball]

We recently spent some time studying the usage patterns for Cleartrip Mobile and found that lots of users were first searching for flights on one date and then searching dates adjacent to their original date before making an actual booking. Having to do three or four different searches on a mobile device can be tedious.

We decided to make it easier for users to search adjacent dates by introducing one-touch controls to let users jump to flight results for the previous and next day from their original search date. We moved the day and date of your search to the top of the screen and added arrows on either side to let users jump straight to flight results for the day before or after.

You can also click the day and date if you want to change your date but leave the rest of the search the same. Users can now select a completely different date for their search without having to go fill out the entire search form again.

For the moment, these features are only available on our one way flight search.

We were happy to see that a lot of our mobile users started using this feature from the moment we launched it — so, if you’re planning a trip with flexible dates for travel, your flight search on mobile just got a lot easier.

The post was first brought to our attention by @jackerhack on Twitter and the social media echo chamber took over from there — “#Cleartrip” began trending on Twitter in Mumbai and Bangalore and the post was picked up by Hacker News. Given the Republic Day holiday, we reacted as fast as we could — we clarified our design approach on Twitter, in comments on the original blog, in comments on Hacker News and posted a clarification on our own blog.

The message from the echo chamber was loud and clear — we had screwed up the design of a feature and it was confusing our customers. Confusing to the point where customers were questioning our integrity and intentions.

Here’s the original design:

The text on the label stated “X seats left” and hovering over the label with the mouse revealed more text in a tooltip — “at this price”. We designed it this way to conserve precious real estate in our search results displays. If a user read the label and the tooltip, the message was clear — “X seats left at this price”. If the user saw only the label and not the tooltip, however, it wasn’t clear what the “X seats left” was trying to say; and users were taking it to mean that there were only “X seats left” on the entire flight, regardless of price.

One of the biggest criticisms of the original design was that critical information was hidden in a tooltip, confusing our users and making us appear ‘shady’. In addition, tooltips don’t work on today’s touch-screen interfaces at all.

We’ve always believed that for an idea to metamorphose into a useful product, it needs to evolve through several rounds of tweaks and adjustments. So, we went back to the drawing board to reinvent the feature.

We wanted the redesign to achieve just one thing — make it crystal clear that the label, ‘X seats left’, indicates the number of seats left at a specific price point and not the total number of seats remaining on the flight. We also wanted to make sure that the redesigned feature did not depend on tooltips or other ‘invisible’ user interface elements, which reduce usability.

Eliminating the need for a tooltip was actually quite easy. We added “at:” to the end of the “X seats left” label and moved the label directly to the left of the price. We think this is a fairly elegant and effective solution as the design now reads as “X seats left at: Rs. 1,234″. Easy to read, easy to grasp and no invisible tooltips required.

The iterated design solved the problem we set out to fix. But a Hacker News commenter, breckinloggins, and one of our own hackers suggested that we go above and beyond solving just the initial problem by also helping users understand what happens to prices after the “X seats left” are sold out. Breckinloggins even mocked up an ASCII prototype to illustrate how we could take the feature one step further.

So, we hacked up a cool little add-on to the original feature — we now also indicate how much the price will rise once the “X seats left” are sold.

The above screenshot shows that there is one seat left at Rs. 7,784. Once this seat is sold, prices for the same flight are expected to rise by Rs. 1,197 to Rs. 8,981. We think this ‘little hack’ increases the value of the feature considerably — users can now see if seats at the existing price are going to sell out soon and see how much the price is expected to increase if they wait to book. The price increase information is displayed only when a users hovers his mouse over a flight in the search results. We did it this way to avoid adding clutter to the search results.

We hope you like the redesigned feature and we hope it helps you make better and faster decisions while planning and booking your travel. We’d like to thank everyone for their input and feedback on the original design — it was incredibly useful in helping us create a better solution.

(*Note*: Airfares and seat inventory are highly dynamic and there will be cases where we are unable to provide information about expected price increases due to lack of data.)

This poster is my favourite from the series for two reasons:

1. The very best, simplest and most effective designs are the results of painstaking work done by designers as they strive to simplify the complex. It is always easy for others to look at the finished result and say, “Oh, I could have thought of that”, but the truth is that they didn’t and the likelihood that they ‘could have’ is non-existent.
2. People who aren’t designers believe they are entitled to chime in on design decisions with their “input”. Because, you know, everyone’s a designer these days.

Even though our mobile experience is different from our desktop experience, we’ve tried to keep fundamental concepts similar to reduce the learning curve for users who are accustomed to using our regular site. For instance, on our desktop site, users can pick departure and return flights on the same screen and the total price for the trip is displayed upfront. We’ve always loved the ability to show our customers WYSIWYG pricing as they search. We believe it gives customers more control and simplifies their decision-making as they select which flights to book.

For obvious reasons we didn’t have the luxury to design round trip search results the same way for Cleartrip Mobile. The design constraints imposed by smaller screens pushed us down a path where we had to break up the process of picking round trip flights into two steps or two separate screens for selecting departure and return flights. The first time we did this, we stuck to our WYSIWYG pricing for the entire trip by displaying the total fare for the trip on the first screen itself. We calculated the total price by combining the fare of each departure flight with the cheapest return flight available. Here’s what it looked like:

This approach had its advantages, but it clearly didn’t match the mental model of most users. The key problem was that users assumed the price shown on the first screen to be a one-way price and not the total round trip price, giving them the impression that our prices were way too expensive. We decided to go back to the drawing board to see how we could redesign the flow. In addition to improving the design, we also had a secondary goal of making it easier to discover special roundtrip fares with round trip discounts

In a nutshell, here’s what’s changed:

• Pricing information is now split across the departure & return flight

• Your selected departure flight is displayed for quick reference while you pick your return flight

• Flights with special round trip fares are marked and can be easily filtered in both the steps.

We believe, this redesign gives our customers more control while helping them easily discover the lowest fares available. We’ve received positive feedback from our customers and a significant increase in the number of round trips booked via Cleartrip Mobile. Give the new round trip search on Cleartrip Mobile a spin, we’d love to hear what you think of the changes.

We’d like to take the opportunity to explain and to improve.

How often have you shortlisted a particular flight (at a particular price point), and then seen the price change when you came back to book, even if it’s just a few minutes or a few hours later?

Airline pricing is based on ‘fare classes’ or ‘buckets’. Buckets typically work like this:

• Each bucket is allocated a fixed number of seats.
• Each bucket is associated with exactly one price point.
• When there are no more seats available in a bucket, prices from the next highest bucket are displayed and so on.

To help our users make faster and better decisions, we launched a feature last week to show our users when there are very few seats left in a bucket (i.e. a specific price point). The feature is not an algorithm — it only shows users a simple count of the number of ‘seats remaining’ at a specific price point for a specific flight departure.

For instance, let’s take a single person search for a flight from Bangalore to Srinagar on 26th January. The available price for a specific Kingfisher flight is Rs. 14,839. As there is only a single seat available at that price point, we display a “1 SEAT LEFT” indicator under the price.

There is only a single seat left at a price point of Rs. 14,839. This does not mean that there is only one seat left on the flight, it means there is only one seat left at that specific price.

When we repeat the same exact search for two travellers instead of one, the total price for the same exact Kingfisher flight is Rs. 33,240 or Rs.16,620 per person. The price per person increases by Rs. 1,781 (almost 12%) because there aren’t two seats available at the Rs. 14,839 price.

For three travellers, it gets even more interesting — the total price goes to Rs. 58,259, or Rs.19,419 per person. The per person price is now higher by Rs. 4,580 for the same seat.

We hope this post explains our current implementation of the feature. We will also be taking a hard look at how we can improve and make the feature clearer since it seems to be confusing some users and causing a storm in a social media teacup.

Successful companies are started by people who want to make something — something new, something better — which the world will want. These are people who see things in the world and ask themselves, “Why does it have to be that way? Heck, it should be a hell of a lot better than that.” And then they push themselves and everyone around them to make it happen.

We recently ran a post here entitled Why are you starting something? where we stated:

If you’re starting something without a clear idea of what problem your startup will solve, your startup will fail.

We wanted to revisit that today, because there’s too many people starting things for the wrong reasons. The wrong reason we hear most often is some variation of “I want to be my own boss”.

There are gobs of so-called ‘entrepreneurs’ who start companies with nothing more than this as their rationale. They think big and dream even bigger about how one day they will be rich and famous with no one to thank but themselves. They write manifestoes, think up company names, write blogs and focus on how ‘cool’ it is to be ‘doing a startup’. They delude themselves and, in general, waste a lot of their own time and energy doing it.

Think about this for a moment, because it’s important–your company’s raison d’etre is that “you want to be your own boss”? If a company’s entire reason for existing is that the founder “wants to be their own boss”, why should the rest of the world give a damn? Does the company have a purpose other than celebrating your self-employment? Why will anyone want to be employed by a company which exists primarily to serve its founder’s megalomania?

What’s more, the romantic notion of being ‘your own boss’ is very different from the reality of it. When you start a company, the buck stops with you. All the bucks stop with you. Did marketing screw something up? No, you screwed it up, you fix it. Sales team isn’t hitting their targets? No, you’re not hitting the targets. Engineering team can’t figure out a good approach for code management? Your problem. In-fighting between departments? Your problem. Everything is your problem and everyone else is your boss–your investors, your employees, your partners and your customers; you are answerable to them all.

The very worst part is that most startups fail. And the so-called ‘startups’, created by ‘entrepreneurs’ who are enamoured of being their own bosses, they’re more likely to fail than startups focused on ideas for the things they want to create. If you’re not extremely passionate about what you’re doing, one day you will want to stop doing it. Are you really that passionate about being your own boss? Is anyone?

Steve Jobs said this part best:

“I get asked this a lot and I have a pretty standard answer which is, a lot of people come to me and say ‘I want to be an entrepreneur’. And I go ‘Oh that’s great, what’s your idea?’ And they say ‘I don’t have one yet’. And I say ‘I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you’re really passionate about because it’s a lot of work. I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life… Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.” ~ Steve Jobs

“I want to be my own boss” is not a good reason to start a company. In fact, it might well be the worst reason, so spare yourself and everyone else the agony. Start a company because you’re going to make something great, not because you’re going to make a great boss for yourself.