Customer Intermediate Booking System A B Know-how, experience Flexible User Interfaces for B2C Systems, Using Booking as a Case Study Olsen, K.A. Molde College N-6402 Molde Norway kai.olsen@himolde.no Malizia, A. Dip. Scienze dell'Informazione, Universita' di Roma, Via Salaria 113, 001895 Roma (Italy) malizia@di.uniroma1.it Abstract With the Internet and the Web the “terminal” can be moved into our homes, allowing us to access databases of any kind directly without going through intermediates. In practice these business to consumer applications have been implemented by building front ends to the old legacy systems. In this paper we question if this is enough? Many customers going to the Web to make a booking may be flexible with regard to dates and times, where to go and even if to go. The interfaces that are offered today expect detailed and specific data and do therefore not account for this flexibility. In this paper we discuss the possibilities of retaining some of this functionality offered by the human travel agent by enhancing current Web interfaces. After presenting a background study, we will suggest interfaces that to a better degree can aid the customer in performing a booking. While we use booking as an example, many of the ideas presented here can be applied to other systems as well. 1 Background With the Internet in our homes we can take intermediates out of the loop and do the job ourselves, interfacing directly to the airline booking system, the bank system, the online shop. Many companies have implemented these B2C (Business to Consumer) systems by building a Web interface on top of their legacy systems. Thus customers are now using the same systems as the intermediates used earlier (Lightner, 2004). This works fine in many cases. Take booking as an example. With some enhancement of the interface, letting users select from lists, choose a date from a calendar, offer a credit card number, and click on buttons the booking process can be performed by anyone with a minimum of computer and Internet experience. This works for simple closed request, i.e., request that can be mapped directly into formalized terms such as dates, airports, flights, etc. However, they break down for the more complex closed requests, i.e., where the customer is flexible with regard to attributes such as destination and dates. Further, current systems cannot handle the more open requests that cannot be mapped directly into the formalized terms offered by the Web interface. These are the cases where the intermediate earlier used her knowledge and experience in order to aid the customer. For example, a request to the intermediate, the travel agent, may be to find an “inexpensive weekend trip from Pittsburgh to New York”. Initially the agent can expand this open request by asking the customer what type of hotel he is interested in, both with regard to quality and location, and on which dates he may wish to go. The agent may use her experience to suggest times of the year when there may be a possibility of getting bargain tickets, also to suggest airlines that offer discount fares to discount airports. She may even ask what he wants to see in the city, and may even recommend Washington DC as better alternative if he is interested in taking the kids to museums and avoiding expensive hotels. Figure 1: Booking tickets through a human intermediate (a travel agent) needs, wishes, interests