Minube search results: beauty and honesty

by javier on 4/08/2010

I deeply believe that honesty and beauty are two of the most important values in design. We put as much as we could in the redesign of the Search Results page of Minube for flights and hotels and the result has been good. Here it is:

Our assumptions

We (both minube and us) put extreme attention to what information mattered the most and made it stand above the secondary data. These were our main assumptions:

Price matters most than company.
Price (usually) matters most than hours.
There is the cheapest and then the rest.
Airlines are better recognized by their logos/colors than by their names.
Some things don’t need to be a in a filter: price ranges, airline, websites searched, etc.
Those with flexible dates need a different way to look at it.
It’s easier to redo the search than to refine through ajax.
Flight and flight back are consecutive, so let’s show them consecutive.
It’s likely that your choice will be among the first 10 results (although you may want to see more).
White space helps people identify choices, it makes everything clearer.
Boxes help you separate between different types of content.
It’s better to show just the essential data.

Old and new versions side to side

Minube is always quesioning how they do things and how these things can be improved. I like to say that at Vostok we are not good at innovating but at improving. The old version was good. But good as it was it could be, and should be improved. Here you have both versions side to side:

Facts prove it

We know the new one is more beautiful and more honest. Facts prove it. Raúl (Minube’s CEO) told me about the A/B Test results and the main indicators doubled in the new one. You should check Raúl’s post in Spanish about it.

We both believe

It’s a great thing we have clients who share our believes. Working with minube is always of great pleasure. We have a relationship based on trust and shared values. They also think that beauty and honesty are two of most important principles of good design.

There are 7 comments in this article:

5/08/2010Tweets that mention The Cosmonauts: Minube search results: beauty and honesty -- Topsy.com says:

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Javier Martin, sergio alvarez and Cosmonauta, Javier Cañada. Javier Cañada said: Beauty and honesty in search results http://www.vostok.es/blog/minube-search-results-beauty-and-honesty [...]
5/08/2010César Astudillo says:

I just love it!
And it’s great to see your approach backed by the numbers. In fact, I’m puzzled that so few Internet companies in Spain do split tests. Everybody should be doing them.
5/08/2010Javier says:

Thank you very much, César.
6/08/2010César Astudillo says:

You’re welcome man, I do mean it

A little warning about visual design though: I find the light grey background you use in every other table row in the second block virtually invisible in my PC. I guess the principle of “least notable difference” is suffering from the difference in gamma values between PCs and Macs. Maybe you might make the light grey in even lines of the table in the second block as dark as the cell background in the calendar table in the third block, which I do see.

This reminds me of something we learnt when we designed the interface for the ATMs in Caja Madrid: when we tested our visual design in a sample of different ATM models from their tech laboratory, we were horrified to see that the difference in gamma among their range of installed ATMs was so huge that it removed any possibility of nuance. White tended to look acceptably whitish; black tended to look reasonably blackish; and outside that, the look of any grey shade was utterly unpredictable. A 50% grey could look black in some screens, and white in other. A nightmare.

Finally we took a “graceful degrading” approach: we drew the interface in pure blacks and whites, and then we added to it a “makeup” of light colours that made it look better, but that did no harm to understanding the screen if it was whited out. We had a Photoshop levels layer that simulated the destructive effect of the most poorly-adjusted screens, and we tested all interface elements with that layer to make sure you didn’d lose information. This had the additional benefit of making it the most readable ATM I’ve seen when you use it outdoors and under bright sunlight.
6/08/2010César Astudillo says:

(when I said “least notable difference” I meant “least noticeable difference”)
6/08/2010Javier says:

César, you are right about that one.
6/08/2010Javier says:

When designing and testing planetaki I got what we called the Toshiba Viejo for testing purposes: an old grey brick that ran Windows 98 (or NT, I don’t even remember now) wich was perfect for hard testing: bad monitor, bad mouse and slow OS. It was a good way to test.

The Vostok blog