A UI Design Case Study and a Prototype of a Travel Search Engine

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive UI design case study and a prototype of a travel search engine, emphasizing user-centered design, usability, and integration of best features from existing travel websites.

Contribution

It introduces an open-source, user-centered travel search engine prototype incorporating best features and design guidelines from 2002, with feasibility studies and heuristic evaluations.

Findings

Prototype demonstrates effective UI design principles.

Feasibility and heuristic reviews support design choices.

Open-source prototype facilitates further development.

Abstract

We review a case study of a UI design project for a complete travel search engine system prototype for regular and corporate users. We discuss various usage scenarios, guidelines, and so for, and put them into a web-based prototype with screenshots and the like. We combined into our prototype the best features found at the time (2002) on most travel-like sites and added more to them as a part of our research. We conducted feasibility studies, review common design guidelines and Nelson's heuristics while constructing this work. The prototype is itself open-source, but has no backend functionality, as the focus is the user-centered design of such a system. While the prototype is mostly static, some dynamic activity is present through the use of PHP.