SIDDHARTH DASARI for KAYAK siddharthdasari@gmail.com 16.12.2014
TASK ONE PRICE TREND FEATURE
stage one
QUESTIONS & THOUGHTS
I initially started the process by asking my friends and colleagues what they thought about the feature. I printed it out and asked them their thoughts on it, what they liked, disliked, understood, or did not understand. I had a lot of assumptions initially and these conversations helped me get rid of the assumptions and get some quick ideas on the direction I wanted to take. At the end of it, I had enough information to start sketching out some ideas and putting some main points together. I mapped out some flows, detailed out what worked and what didn’t and gathered some ideas on what would be a working graph to plot the prices. This was also when I looked at some of the ideas which are in the market currently and this gave me a picture of what I did not want to do.
stage two
IDEAS
Once I knew the direction I wanted to take to clean the graph legibility, I sketched out some options based on various graph styles from a totally visual point of view, keeping in mind the clutter and overload of information problem of the existing one. Condensing months and 30 days of data into the small real estate wasn’t delivering the information accurately, so I started out with a 7-day approach and gave the user the option to control the amount of data he wished to know or interact with
stage three
MOCKUPS
I finalised on two different ideas for the graphs and quickly got to translating the sketches into mockups on Illustrator and worked on a very rough grid, keeping in mind the information of the selected flights on the top and aligning the box to the middle left of the page, right below the selected flight information.
KEY FEATURES AND IDEAS 1. I conducted a quick user research on 5 different people and a common problem / issue among all 5 subjects was the value the ‘previous 90 day fare’ option would bring to them. All of them didn’t want to know ‘if they had planned it well, they would’ve gotten a cheaper fare’ and didn’t want to use it, so I took the liberty to give lesser importance to this and condense the information. I’m a huge fan of simplfying things and this quick research and insight helped me gain some space and de-clutter. 2. Condense the ‘advice’ text and retain what’s essential, so if someone wants to know how the confidence was measured, they could hover over for an explanation 3. Most of the users just wanted to know when the cheapest fare would be and how they should plan their travels around that date, so I translated the ‘flexible date fare price’ into a 7 /14 /30 day feature so it becomes more flexible and interactive instead of cluttering it with 30 day data initially. The bar graphs were more readable to the users than a mountain worm. The second option includes the avg. monthly low fare and the lowest fare comparison in a different visual style. I retained this as I did not understand the feature quite well, but thought the style helped differentiate the two, better.
OPTION 1: Month View
OPTION 1: 7 day view
OPTION 2: 7 day view
TASK TWO MOVIES METASEARCH
CONCEPT
A lot of thoughts. Should Kayak sell movie tickets? Is this like a spin off from IMDB? Should people discuss movies? Should it book taxis to the movies? One feature I thought would be darn interesting is to tap the potential of the movie filming locations. A lot of times while watching a movie, one does want to know where it was shot and its a known fact that those locations become hot tourist attractions (like the island from Cast Away, New Zealand for Lord of the Rings, Iceland for Game of Thrones etc) So I thought of integrating movie review / ticket booking and a travel to filming location feature which would complement Kayak’s interests and expertise in the travel and ticketing domain.
THANK YOU siddharthdasari@gmail.com 16.12.2014