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Comment by yarone | Hacker News Reader

One thing about Hipmunk that mystifies me: the date-picker widget on the homepage. A friend of mine says "Have you seen it!? Check out Hipmunk.com. Awesome new user interface for booking flights." So I go to the site expecting some awesome, clean, super-thoughtful UI and actually got stuck for a second.

1) There isn't a direct visual relationship between the "depart" / "return" fields and the date picker (i.e. I didn't see a standard dropdown or calendar icon or way to pick a date)

2) I didn't realize that the date picker widget is one calendar, spanning two months. I thought it was two calendars: one for depart, one for return.

Wondering: Am I the only one? Did they actually test this? Would a "traditional" design with two fields, each with a calendar icon / dropdown perform better? OR, maybe two fields and one calendar beside or beneath each?

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I really hate the way other sites have hidden calendars that pop-up. They all try to be too smart about it, and often ends up with me switching back and forth between mouse and keyboard. IMHO, some guy had a bad idea 10 years ago about how to do calendars, and everyone has been copying it since.

I think our version works really nicely if you know how it behaves. So, the challenge to us is to make its behavior more obvious.

Hipmunk's calendar has changed quite a bit since we launched, and I haven't heard much complaining lately. Maybe we just scared everyone away.

Here's an idea. See: http://i.imgur.com/vTOKr.jpg

What I did:

- Increased priority of "depart and return" calendar.

- Added "click or type below" to make instructions more clear.

- Added a small indicator beside mouse pointer (when hovering over a date) to indicate the current mode of the mouse pointer (two modes: you're either hovering and ready to click on a depart date OR you're hovering and ready to click on a return date).

- Subordinated the depart and return fields. Selecting from the date picker with a mouse should automatically fill these fields.

Why?

- I assume (maybe wrongly so, I am not sure) that the date picker is the most common / popular / usable way to enter in the dates.

- Compared to the current home page, I think this addresses my complaints (see earlier comment) in that it (1) significantly reduces the disparity between the date pickers and the fields, and (2) makes it more clear that the two calendars are in fact for the entry of both the depart and return dates (and not two separate calendars).

Having the calendar automatically switch modes between Depart and Return can be confusing at first in some cases. E.g.: (1) click Dec 15 for Depart date, (2) click the Return text field, then click Jan 5 as the Return date, (3) remember that Jan 6 (not Jan 5) should be the return date, so click Jan 6, (4) wonder "what happened???".

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