Predicting User Input, An Important Trend
Predicting what users are typing is a very nice feature that is going to make your website visitors’ life easier. A typical example is the travel websites, more precisely Yahoo! Travel. As users type the departure city name the system shows possible matches.
This is a good example of how usability can have an economic impact, as predicting input will probably avoid a lot of errors. Imagine misspelled city names or unhappy users if your system does not identify a destination airport after clicking on the search button.
Other travel websites, like Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz, are not taking advantage of this easy to implement feature. Bad for them.
Popularity: 9% [?]
This is a must have usability feature in the “Web 2.0″ era. I would seem crazy for a travel site not to implement a simple auto suggest function. Speaking of which does anyone have any suggestions for a good AJAX Autosuggest that searches a MySQL Database using PHP?
I hate when travel websites don’t have auto suggest for the airport codes!
Steve: have a look at this article: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/06/20/ajax-javascript-solutions-for-professional-coding/