Google flights mobile app feedback/research [closed]

Question

I created a mock-up mobile app for Google flights for a UX design project. Does anyone have any pain points when it comes to mobile flight search whether on:

• Google
• Existing mobile apps like Expedia, Skyscanner, Hopper, FlightAware, etc
• Existing airline apps like Delta, United, Alaska, etc

Are there features when it comes to your flight search that you wish you could have that you don’t see featured anywhere?

Anything is great feedback thank you. I have created a page for my case study so far if you feel inclined to have a visual understanding of the mobile application. https://loumarar.com/2/

Answer 1

That's going to be tough.

I've skimmed your existing text, and you make it sound like Google Flights is currently not user-centered. That's blankly incorrect. The first thing you've got to realize is that gFlights is very, very good. They built this service with a specific UX approach, over ten years, with millions of dollars of research, and the only reason that gFlights is the first in your list of examples today is the fact that Google built it so well (I'm not a Google fanboy, but credit where credit is due).

So, if you're blindly attacking gFlights and "improve" the design without understanding the thousands of considerations they made for different users, you are going to look unprofessional.

I think you have a chance if you look at very specific niches. Maybe people with only cabin luggage that don't want to pay a fee for non-existing big luggage are underserved? Maybe if you set your language to Greenlandic the long words break the UI?

Check out something like that, and you may have a chance to design a genuine improvement :)

Answer 2

A few things I would find useful or more user-friendly:

1. You added a "round-trip" dropdown (and most travel apps do this). But why ? It seems easier to me to select a departure date, and If I want a return, add a return date. Adding a return date makes it a round-trip search.

2. Same for "economy": might not be a criteria for a lot of people, and no one will turn down a business-class ticket if it's cheaper than the economy one. If I want a minimum level of comfort, then I would expect to be able to add a filter for it. But that filter doesn't have to be one of the first fields to fill.

3. A lot of travel apps don't make it easy to edit a search from the results page.

4. I see you've dropped the pages to search at an unknown date, or see the price graph for a whole month. These are super useful.

5. A lot of apps let you add several departure cities, But I think no app lets you choose several arrival cities without specifying a departure city. This would be quite useful to me. I understand it's quite niche, but say you're travelling and you have many options where to go now (think interrail or digital nomads), you just need to be at a specific place in a month's time. Then you might want to pick where to go now based on what will be easy/cheap in a month. (I think only Kiwi does that part of the search well if you want to try it, but then their booking experience is much less good)

6. Include other transport methods (train, bus, car-sharing, ferries). Flying is only one way to get from A to B.

7. And maybe make it possible to combine methods (e.g. fly to London then train to somewhere else in England, with enough time in between, and insurance if you miss the train because of a late flight)

8. Also I can't be the only one who's annoyed by low-cost companies advertising great prices, only to have to add expensive luggage. It would make it easier if you could compare what's comparable directly in the search. Say, in your filters, you say "either without luggage or with 1 piece of hand luggage per person" and in the results you get, for each flight, both the price without hand luggage and the price with 1 piece. Though I suppose the data is not easily available for this, otherwise google would have probably done it already.