I think I'm in the minority but I can't stand Hipmunk's UI. With Kayak I just put in when I'm going, time of day I want to leave and hit the nonstop button. Then I get a nice ordered list by price boom done.
Maybe I'm spoiled I live near two major airports (Oakland and SFO) and tend to travel to large cities. But I've not found hipmunk's UI innovation to be anything but excess nonsense I don't need.
I'm the opposite, I absolutely despise Kayak's UI and how it explodes for anything but the simplest itineraries (and even then it's a pain).
For one thing, Kayak doesn't let you pick your departure and return legs separately, and instead displays every possible permutation of flights that fit your search criteria. I remember seeing over a thousand "results" for SFO-JFK. How a user is expected to make a decision there... your guess is as good as mine.
The number of "results" explode even further for any flight with possible connections.
Also, the arbitrary filters that one needs to chop the result set down to something mentally digestible are also highly flawed. When I fly is important to me, but if I say, restrict the results to "departs before 11am", it will filter out something that leaves at 11:05am. The more "analog" view of Hipmunk is greatly preferable.
All that said, I'm cautiously hopeful for Hipmunk. I love their UX, but building a business around something that has infamously low margins (like, incredibly, razor thin margins) seems like a questionable strategy. I can see why Hipmunk has expanded into hotel bookings (though IMO it's not very good), but one has to wonder about the viability of its core product.
> but if I say, restrict the results to "departs before 11am", it will filter out something that leaves at 11:05am.
What is wrong with that :)? Set the threshold to 12PM if the 11:05 flight is OK with you.
Hipmunk confuses me because I have to do the back and forth dance between the two legs to find the price/time optimum point. I can zero in on a solution much faster with Kayak's depart/arrive filters.
> "Set the threshold to 12PM if the 11:05 flight is OK with you"
But the 11:55am flight is not OK. In any case, this is breaking what users have to do now - they have to purposely break the UI to get the results they need. They have to lie to the system to coerce out the answers they actually want, as opposed to the system being smart about it.
When I say "leave at 11am", I mean "the closer to 11 the better", not "place a hard limit".
Not to mention, Kayak's results display is terrible - the information is densely packed and not in an easily parseable way, making flight comparisons a gigantic chore. If I want to compare my departure times, it stuffs the return trip (which frankly, has no business being there) times right underneath.
It also insists on showing raw time values, without any visual indication of longer flights vs. shorter flights, nor visual indication that differentiates departure/landing times. This is only a couple notches above comparing UNIX timestamps. Manually, consciously subtracting time values is not something people are good at, and certainly humans perform poorly at it when forced to do it many times in short order.
It is, in short, needlessly precise. It doesn't matter if one flight leaves at 6:05am and the other leaves at 6:08am. I don't need that kind of precision in my decision-making process. Nor do I need to know if one flight is 8 minutes longer than the other. It's noise, and it's poor UX.
Nowadays I go out of my way to avoid Kayak - or really anyone who fails to separate the two legs of a trip. It's ugly, it's information overload, and it's downright maddening.
Wow all things you've listed is what I love about Kayak. It is fascinating that a simple task such as flight search can lead to such fragmented user preferences.
You're right that the hipmunk UI may be overkill for your use-case of simple point-to-point flights, but I wonder how much of the market that represents?
That said, reducing the complexity of the UI for that usecase might be a way to increase adoption.
NB I do a lot of complicated travel, and hipmunk found me a fare that saved me $1800! I use ITA matrix, KVSTool, etc, and oddly enough it didn't show up there.
Maybe I'm spoiled I live near two major airports (Oakland and SFO) and tend to travel to large cities. But I've not found hipmunk's UI innovation to be anything but excess nonsense I don't need.