Question

An airline company is designing a new online reservation system. They want to add some direct-manipulation features. For example, they would like customers to click a map to specify the departure cities and the destinations, and to click on the calendar to indicate their schedules. From your point of view, list two benefits and two problems of the new idea compared with their old system, which required the customer to do the job by typing text. (Answer in 400 - 500 words.)

Answer 1

Benefits:

1. Many users might find it more intuitive to navigate the interface this way. Some users might not know the name of the airport they need to go to, so they can see all airports in the region they want to travel to and then click it.

2. The calendar could help them precisely choose the date and time they would like to travel. The calendar could help prevent them from mis-scheduling.

3.Encourage people to explore the places they might want to go.

4.Reduce the formatting you have to do in order to check the date and location input.

5.You can show users prices at the same time that they pick out their location

Problems

1.It would in some cases be faster to select the correct airport from a list.

2. It would be faster in some case to manually type in the time and date you’d like to travel.

3. It might be harder to find the correct airport from a map.

4. People might choose the wrong time and date from a calendar.