Our study has shown that: Because Flight-lines can establish good mapping between the computer display of information and the user's conceptual model of the information (Nielsen, 1993, p126), it provides a more compact information presentation format, involves less vertical scrolling, allows users to quickly get an overview of the flights information and see relationships among the events. So subjects with Flight-Lines completed simple tasks in approximately the same amount of time as the subjects with Fare-Finder, subjects with Flight-Lines completed complex tasks in less time than the subjects with Fare-Finder and subjects with Flight-Lines have higher recall rates than those with Fare-Finder. And because of the relatively incompact layout of the Fare-Finder, users had to spend much time on comparing and computing when trying to complete the task, Fare-Finder showed large performance variance. This is also one of the reason why out experiment result did not show statistically significant difference which favored the graphical presentation under some circumstance. The result also showed that subjective satisfaction of Flight-Lines is similar to that of Fare-Finder, this is because our experiment is between group, without comparison, users cannot give higher grades to one of the presentations .

Impact for practitioners:

Now, many travel sites provide services on assisting the travelers to find airline flight information  for their travel plan. The airline flight information provided by these sites are usually displayed in textual tabular format and sorted in ascending order by their prices. Users have to scan through the list to choose an airline flight. As for as we know, no travel site presents the such information in graphical format. The designers of such travel websites can consider displaying their flights list in graphical format. The Flight-Lines (Graphical presentation) combined with error prevention and information conformation mechanism may provide a better service, gain more popularity for the website. And a carefully designed instruction will be necessary and helpful for the novice users of the Flight-lines to get familiar with such presentation.

Suggestion for future researchers:

The limitation of our design is that it is only for one day airline flight information. Studies on comparison of Flight-Lines format, which provides information for long term, and the accordingly Tabular format will have tremendous value. The researchers can also think of designing new experiment with more subjects and more complex tasks to decide whether the more complex the task is, the better Flight-Lines performs compared to Fare-Finder. And a within group experiment can be designed only for comparing user satisfaction. The interface for these experiments should be carefully designed to avoid any bias.