potatolicious,

Great to see your thoughts.

1. Sorting by agony: I'm glad to hear that this feature is useful for some folks. But why do I have to go to the FAQ page to understand what Agony is? Do you really believe mainstream users would go and read FAQs before buying products? The benefit of sorting by "Agony" must be explicit on the results page itself. How to make it explicit is something the UI designers at Hipmunk need to think about.

2. From $639: When I'm walking by a store and my wife points me to a sign that says "dresses from 99$", the sceptic in me reminds her that there are probably just a few dresses that are priced $99(maybe just 1?). The rest are probably priced at 199 or 299 or even 2599. We sometimes still end up going in and buying something, but are very aware that the "From" is deceiving.

Or when we see a sign that says "Discount upto 60%" where the fontsize of the "Discount upto" part is 20 and the "60%" part is 1000. We know there could be just one item that has a 60% discount. We are skeptical.

When a user sees "From 200$" on Hipmunk, the same flag is raised. I'd say, just remove the "From". As long as they get at least one flight at that price, they're not going to complain. Why confuse users with an extra confusing word?

3. Picking flight legs separately: I'm not sure what the basis is of labeling this an edge case. I search for flights, Hipmunk presents me with onward options. At this stage, I have zero visibility into what return options I have for each flight shown. How would you find out the return options? By selecting each individual flight in turn and going to the choose return flight page. That sounds like a lot of potential back and forths (read clicks!) to me. We all know what increasing the number of clicks does to conversion numbers on ecommerce websites.

I'm not saying being able to pick legs has no benefit. I'm arguing that this is not the most common use case users care about. A business traveler who has enough time and doesn't have to worry about prices would probably love this feature. But that doesn't sound like the mainstream user to me. And if I were Hipmunk, my target would be mainstream users who aren't the most patient. Think bounce rates? :)

4. We might be talking of different things here. my fourth point was about flight durations, I'd like to know how long a flight is. Hipmunk just shows a strip between vertical time markers are spaced 4 hours apart. To find out the duration: (a) I have to hover over the flight (2) I need to do a quick calculation in my head of how long a flight is that departs at 6 am PST and lands at 4.35 PM PST. Not easy.

Flight durations are important: they indicate how long I'm stuck on a flight.

6. How common is the use case of a person searching for more than 1 flight at the same time? Say, you were looking for a weekend flight from SFO to Boston. What added benefit would you get from opening two tabs?

I'm open to the notion that folks might want to run parallel searches. I just don't understand the logic or benefit of doing it. Please educate me :)

I think Hipmunk is quite promising. I wrote this when it came out:
http://www.dpsmiles.org/blog/2010/08/19/hipmunk-a-review/

My problem is: I keep telling my wife I like Hipmunk, but when it's time to book a flight, I end up going to the somewhat ugly but really easy to use Kayak. That should ring an alarm bell for Hipmunk: when well wishers praise your product but never use it. So I could have very well titled my blog post "Why I love Hipmunk but never use it.."