The user interface. (reservation and ticketing systems)(includes related article)

Being a consultant, I spend a lot of time on the road. Thus, I also spend a lot of time talking to my friendly neighborhood travel agent. Recently, I happened to stop by the travel agency and observe her using one of the major national on-line travel reservation and ticketing systems via its new Windows user interface. It was painful to watch!

If you've ever seen a travel agent, or a clerk at an airport ticket counter, interact with one of these reservation systems, you've probably noticed the form of the original (pre-Windows) user interface. The user will type in a string of characters (very few separators, so it's not really 'words'), and the system will respond with either a table of character data or an arcane error message. It's an example of what we used to call a "glass teletype" - an application user interface based not on screens but on lines of text, kind of like the DOS command line.

Some further observations:

The table of character data (the best of all likely outcomes to an inquiry transaction) is usually incomplete. For instance, if you ask for flights from Washington to Chicago, you'll see the first two or three listed; if you want to see additional flights, you have to ask for them.

Any further action you want the system to take, based on an initial inquiry about what flights exist, is expressed or communicated in terms of the relative position of the particular flight within the table of flights which your inquiry returned. (That is to say, there's a link in the transaction logic between the results of an inquiry and the data content of a subsequent but related update transaction.)

Not withstanding the above, there is no such link automated as part of the user interface. To tell the system which flight you're interested in, you have to look in the tabular results of the inquiry, note the line number (relative position) of the appropriate flight, and then correctly type that number into your update (reservation) transaction.

Not surprisingly (especially considering the employee turnover in the travel business), system users make a lot of mistakes and spend a lot of time puzzling over the previously mentioned arcane error messages.