Designing Human-Centered AI tools in Google Flights
When to book and when to fly? UX case study about explaining flight prices with AI.
Though much of the world is currently in lock-down and air travel is drastically reduced, the questions this post addresses are as relevant now as they will be once the people of the world again feel they can travel safely to be in one another’s company.
Imagine the scene: you’re living your normal busy life, doing the day-to-day grind, and you realize you haven’t booked that flight for that trip you’ve got to take. Oh right, you may think, the holidays are coming up, I still need to book my flights. I bet flights cost a fortune already. We can relate. In fact, millions of people around the world can relate — flight pricing is tough to anticipate, including for many Google Flights users. Flight prices are subject to changes, inconsistent across sites, and hard to understand. As this video from CNN says, “It’s rocket science.”
Identifying patterns in flight prices is tricky. They change a lot. According to some popular blogs, even on a single plane, a type of seat that sells for 100 dollars to one user can easily sell for 500 dollars to another user.
We at Google Flights thought that if we can put some of the data and smartness in the hands of…
