Skyscanner is one of the world's leading travel search platforms. They engaged us over a number of projects to develop improvements across a wide range of areas in their online travel search platform, including redesigning the flight, car and hotel verticals which are the 3 pillars of the business.

The nature of travel search is highly dynamic, with multiple dimensions to a given search (origin, destination, dates, class, budget), shaped by different users with different goals. Skyscanner provides one of the few comprehensive aggregation services, processing billions of data points from hundreds of flight providers in real-time to deliver up-to-date results to millions of global users. The technical challenges around this are mirrored in the UX with challenges around communicating the fidelity of results, and minimising the friction to move from a query to a final decision.

In this project the goal was to develop novel methods of interaction with the big data set, with a focus on user needs as core to the experience. This required the ability to capture user needs in a low-friction way through a semantic, natural language query method, and present results with ongoing control of the multiple dimensions so the user could explore and edit the query easily to understand the effects of changes such as trying to different dates or airports until they found an optimal trade-off in terms of budget, convenience, comfort and journey time.