I was looking for a site that used a particular UI element called a “slider”. Sliders are horizontal or vertical bars with an indicator on top. You slide the indicator back and forth to tell the system a particular range or value. These are useful in specific circumstances, but don’t get used all the time. Someone pointed me to this site that uses them wonderfully. http://www.farecast.com

Although I think the visual design is a little flat, and there are way too many words on the page, the UI and Interaction design is top notch with a great attention to detail. Right from the home page type in SFO or JFK and it gives you Google Suggest type dropdowns to verify your choice. One you search, it brings you to the “money” page. This is where you can narrow down your search using the sliders. I thought it was very easy and fast too.

One suggestion would be to change the cursor to a drag symbol when you are on top of the slider interface. Otherwise, it’s solid. The different ways of viewing the data is excellent and easy to guess how it works. Good use of affordances on what is clickable and what is not. Overall, high marks for my 5 minute tour.

I would love to see ForeSee, SurveyMonkey and other survey providers use sliders to express scale between 0-10. It would make surveys more fun to fill out.