Trying to find another date for your fligh: Redesigning a part of LAN.com

I’ve used LAN.com a couple of times for domestic flights and every time the experience was good and easy. However, last Tuesday, due to the warm-up activity, my partner and I discovered that when the date you want to travel isn’t available, it can be troublesome to find another one near.

There were two reasons: (1) You might have to click several times to find the departure date first and also another several times to find your return date, if you were lucky. (2) When you click on: “Try another date”, it sent you back to the homepage to start all over again, making you guess the available date. The page shown on screen was like this one:

So, after watching how easy was for my partner to use the matrix of dates when the system worked, combined with the feedback of how the colours were useful to see clearly the expensive and inexpensive tickets later in the process, the solution just popped to my mind: Used the same kind of matrix combined with a colour code that shows the nearest dates available to travel. So this way they could use something they already have, only changing the colours a little bit.

The idea is something like this:

Where the distribution of the matrix is the same as the one already used. The columns are the nearest available dates for departure and the rows are the nearest dates for return, based on the ones you previously introduced.

The sets of colours might be different, but I think a good idea is to highlight the cheap ones with soft colours and the expensive ones with a darker. The prices in the middle, with a tone between the two extremes.

So in this way, finding the alternative dates for your travel should be far more easy than making several clicks trying to guess when is available the flight you want, or need, to take.