We found 10 reasons why users are frustrated during booking flight tickets

Lots of people loves travelling around the world and nowadays we have great opportunities to visit beautiful places. We can choose from many airlines if we want to get somewhere comfortably. Passengers decide based on price, travel time, destination and unique personal preferences. But there is a step that no one can avoid: you have to book a flight ticket. It is a process that should be easy to go through, because if users get frustrated they might choose an alternative service.

We at our UX company, regularly do lab projects, when we try out new things and this time we took a closer look at KLM's website and part of their booking process. When we started experimenting with this product we were curious about what kind of insights can we get in 2 days. We tested it with 3 users who wants to travel in the near future. Now, let's jump to the usability issues that we found on the tests.

They don't really need Welcome pages

There is a page at the beginning where you must choose your location and language.

Usability issues

• Users got confused, because they couldn’t select the language they want. (1)
• They were not sure how to continue from here.
• This screen seems to be just an extra click and an extra page to process and go through.

Suggestions

• Detect the location automatically and pre-select country.
• Rename 'Select your language' to 'Available languages'. Because it could happen that you can't select your language, but there is another one which is available.
• Place a button to make sure how to continue.
• OR: Get rid of the Welcome page, manage location and language automatically. Later it can be changed in the header.

Home page

Users could easily fill out the details about their flights, the site uses the conventions well. However there were some issues.

Usability issues

• User got frustrated, because the site is in English and the user expected Hungarian (because they selected Hungary on the landing page). (1)
• The user spent time to go through the initial flex matrix diagram. (2)

They didn't get the logic behind flight offers page

This was the most critical page, they got stuck and didn't understand the layout and other parts.

Usability issues

• They didn’t get which column shows the departure and which shows the arrival. (1)
• They didn’t get why you see the price first, and not the destination (2)
• They couldn’t understand the ‘additional price’ in the right column. Seems to be like some additional price (e.g. luggage). The selection of the inbound flight is expected here. (3)
• They don't can't comprehend the bar chart. (4)
• They could find a specific time for the outbound flight but can’t find the inbound (at least they were not sure).

Suggestions

• With titles in the columns, it was more understandable for the users what it is about.
• Display departure and destination in price options
• Instead of ‘Additional price’, offer separated prices for outbound and return flights.

In our current projects, when we get results like this, we try out more alternatives how to solve these. We iterate it more times and also set up analytics to measure the success.

It was a useful experience for us and we hope that we helped others by sharing these results.