Designing Flight Search for Mobile — Digital Marketing News This Week


Skift Take

Flight searches have never really "worked" on mobile. There's simply too much detail involved with purchases to make it worthwhile. Virgin America's new mobile search interface hopes to change that.

This week, we're talking about searching for flights on mobile. Even as mobile purchases for other travel products like hotels and rental cars have been on the rise, flight purchases have been trickier. In addition to the maddening variability in flight prices over time, there's also issues with what designers typically refer to as the "user interface," meaning the actual buttons and menus designed by a flight search website or airline app. As if searching for a flight wasn't confusing enough, trying to book an airline ticket on a smartphone is downright painful. Between nested menus and the small screen size, many travelers give up before trying to navigate this complicated process. While the problem is far from solved, Virgin America's soon-to-launch mobile app looks like