USAir Does Something Right!
Typically if I’m talking about US Airways, I’m complaining. This airline, at least in Philadelphia, normally seems unconcerned with providing any kind of passable customer service. However, today I discovered a feature in their new reservation system that made me positively happy. As you can see over to the right (yellow highlight mine), when the city name is typed into the text field, the form uses some kind of AJAXy, Google Suggest-style functionality to autofill based on what the user has begun to type.
Personally, I use these online travel engines a lot to scope out possible trips, and I get very frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the “airport finder”. (Often times, if the airport code is not specified and only a city name is provided, the page refreshes and forces the user to make another choice before continuing.) This particular feature, however — although somewhat minor in the grand scheme of this page — makes finding the airport code for the city in question much, much easier to do.
Bravo USAir! It’s about time!
[...] I do, however, think that Jake is being short-sighted with his recommendation to offer a text box that asks users to enter the two-digit state code instead. With all the advances we’ve made in AJAXy auto-fill form technology, why not use something similar to the USAIR airport code field generator that I mentioned back in August? There are only so 50 states, so a simple table of all the possible entries would be somewhat easy to build, and this way the user has instant confirmation that they are typing the correct state. [...]
US Air serves Canada, Mexico, Europe, the Bahamas, etc. The state table would not be all that helpful.
similar to how comments by readers who don’t read posts carefully are not that helpful.