AIR INDIA “USER IN EXPERIENCE” Design

Air India online ticket booking experience...nothing worse than this...
Recently, I was looking for fight prices to Bangkok and found Indian Airlines flies from Hyderabad - bangkok from yatra.com

Once i clicked the URL www.inianairlines.in it displayed Air India logos and site branding. Then i thought may be these two companies have merged now. Rechecked the URL but still it showed me www.indianairlines.in. There are 3 sections and each section has button just like a drop down design.

No idea where to click as there is any description. The 3 options are Air India Express, Air India AI Code flights.. (No Idea what this mean).. Air India IC code flights.. (No Idea what this mean.) Tried sometime and it looks like Air India Express is something different service and it has different fleets. Could not flight out difference between AI & IC codes... as there of the links take me to a different websites in a new windows and all of them has its own booking engines.

Ok, finally I thought lets try IC and find out flights for Bangkok.
Here is my booking experience...@ AirIndia .. :)


- The heading says. Book a flight - IC flights... (No idea....What is IC?)
- Multi city link... what it means..? Why is this placed after return...? No idea..!
- More cities link was placed after the cities. I was expecting this might open a other drop down in place and list more cities... but surprisingly it has taken me to other website.. :) We will find similar booking engine and it has few more cities added in the list and again you find a "more cities" link which will open the previous website "IC" in one more window :) What a great workflow..!
- I have selected Hyderabad - Bangkok and selected "Return" radio button and selected dates as Departure: 6 Sept 2009, and Return: 31September 2009. I was looking for the search button and did not find. By mistake I thought "Reset" Button is search and clicked on it. All the fields were reset to current date. I was confused because the reset button was given more priority than the “Book:” by placing this in right. Retyped everything and this time carefully looked into the user interface and realized I need to click on "Book Now" for searching...flights. - Once clicking the "Book Now" button it showed me the same screen, then I clicked 2-3 times but still in the same page. Looked carefully and noticed that there is an error in red color saying "Invalid Departure/Return Date" I thought that there might be no flights available on that day but the fact is that there is no 31st date in September. System doesn’t validate and tell the user about dates being a booking engine. Very sad and bad user experience…ever experienced…!
-By Default Indian Rupees is selected and id don't know why they want Any other currency radio button and a Drop down deactivated - selecting "Australia - AUD" Looks like the designer want to make the interface very busy without any room :)
-Instructions text is very funny; it occupies ~20% real estate and unwanted secondary information.

- All fares are reflected in Indian Rupees.
- Equivalent approximate fares in your chosen currency are also displayed.
- Sale of International Sectors (Ex-India or Return)is now available on our website.

Finally this website has eaten my time and I have decided that let me go back to some private fight booking website and do the booking. I have lost all the good will / credibility about this Air India spending some minutes on their website. I came to a conclusion that if something goes wrong in my shopping cart, I am not sure getting my money back easily...
Tried calling some local agents... at the end of the day :) as I felt they will respond me if I call them and intimate me the status rather than I solely taking risk :)

Summary: For online ticket booking site, search and the booking engine is the heart of the user experience. Too much of information will kill the experience, keep the site as simple as possible and design it more task driven. Have proper validation and give an impression that this site is secured and your money will be safe / secure. Divide the tasks in to primary and secondary and make it simpler to use by providing proper user assistance elements inbuilt in the design. This website needs a serious redesign and need to follow UCD model. Don’t know why Government is putting lot of money in other stuff but why they are not focusing on small things which give revenue to the government and happily diverting the business to the private folks!