Recently, I started working on a project for a large hospitality company. Since our project wouldn't be widely used for 1-2 years, I found myself pondering what types of systems our users would be interacting with by then. The logical answer is of course that tablets would be well part of the mix by then. For several years, I've been advocating including tablets in the standard design process for corporate projects (ex: the challenge with rollovers on touch devices) to ensure that you at least have a basic solution that covers them, but in this case I found myself planning for them as part of the standard environment for any of our personae. This led to a whole bunch of new thoughts (most of them to be documented later).
As everyone who has ever stayed in a hotel can tell you, the first steps of booking are always to enter your check-in and check-out dates (or the number of nights of your stay). The same would go for anyone taking your reservation. This has traditionally been presented as a text field with an icon next to it for each date, which pops up a calendar. This adds quite a few steps and clicks to the beginning of any reservation and seems a bit tedious for a hospitality rep. When you switch a mouse cursor with a fingertip, the process seems even more tedious.
So the natural question was: How can we change the approach to make it more natural (and much quicker) to select a range of dates when using a touch device, but not make it more difficult when using a mouse?
Why not just let the user point and drag?
Seems like a no-brainer to me. What say you?
