It's your world; I'm just redesigning it, Part 63b

It amazes me to this day how difficult it is to use an airline's web site the way you want to. If you want to see a grid of lowest fares over two weeks to understand when the cheapest time to fly would be, you can go to a couple of airlines' sites (British Airways and Travelocity are fairly usable this way) to get that kind of display. But so many of these sites are so obviously untested by real-life people with real-life tasks.

And some things are just on the level of annoyances, like the format of American Airlines' itinerary/receipt. It's three pages long if you print it all (and of course you don't usually NEED those last four paragraphs). Someone could have tried to edit the text or the big fat table that displays the details of the flights to print two or even one page. But nooooooo, it is as if no one ever thought of that before.

And I mentioned Travelocity as a good source but more for information about potential low fares than for tickets. Once in a while I buy a ticket there I can't reproduce anywhere else but often if I find something great there, it vaporizes somewhere between the great low fare I've been told about and the reality once I start looking for dates and times.