Abstract

This disclosure describes a user-interface technique for selecting the two legs of a round-trip (or, more generally, a multi-leg) air itinerary directly from data-visualization charts rather than from a ranked textual list. Two coordinated charts — one for the outbound leg and one for the return leg — each plot every candidate flight offer at a position determined by its price along one axis and its departure time along the other axis, and each chart serves as the primary selection control: a traveler chooses a leg by activating the graphical mark that represents a flight. The two charts are coupled, so that selecting a mark in one chart conditions the presentation of the other chart — options that can be booked together with the current selection are emphasized, while incompatible options are de-emphasized in place — such that the selected pair always constitutes a bookable itinerary. The technique supports both a full-round-trip population mode and a sequential “build-your-trip” mode in which return options are fetched only after an outbound leg is chosen. Itineraries assembled either way are consolidated and de-duplicated by a

routing-and-price identity key and are tagged with a provenance indicator distinguishing searched itineraries from user- assembled ones. In the implemented embodiment, each candidate flight is drawn as a single graphical mark that simultaneously

encodes four attributes: price (its vertical position), departure (takeoff) time (its horizontal position), total travel duration (its length, reinforced by color), and the number of stops (notches along the mark). In other embodiments a mark may instead be a

simple point, and further attributes such as carrier or emissions may be encoded by color, opacity, or shape. Clustering, hover- linking, and collision-tested labeling handle occlusion.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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