Ironhack’s Challenge #3 : Usability Evaluation and Site Redesign

This last prework’s challenge unites what have been done during the two previous ones : design thinking and wireframing.
For it, let’s put on our traveler shoes (despite being studying all summer I’m still able to dream a bit!).

Context

What ?

This work consists of testing usability of a travel planning application and thinking a new design to improve it. It will be decomposed in three main steps :

• Picking one traveler persona, one of the seven wonders and build a travel to it through a travel planning application (Kayak, TripAdvisor, SkyScanner or Hopper)
• Interview three people corresponding to the choosen persona and make them use the application to test it’s usability
• With wireframes, redesign the application based on the problems encountered during usability test

Who ?

Young group

“You and your friends have decided to invest and spend some quality time together. You are planning your trip one year in advance to really make it happen and accommodate everybody’s schedules and needs. You’d like to share as much time together and plan for a lot of fun. You’re interested in a mix of culture and leisure. You have all saved for the last year for the trip so, while you’re still price-conscious this is the opportunity to spoil yourselves.”

Where ?

I chose the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. I like history, archaeology and this place is probably the first wonder I want to see for real so it’s a pleasure for me to build a travel there, even for fake, it’s like planning my own travel for me in the future. ;)

Information about the trip :

• 6 days spent in Aqaba the Jordan’s second largest city from 2nd to 8th september
• Flight from Paris to Aqaba in the south of Jordan
• Visa is bought when arriving at the airport
• Car rental from the airport because there are no trains in Jordan and Petra is in the middle of the country in the desert, 2h driving from Aqaba. Also, it’s better for the group to be free of driving around to discover the surroundings wereas buses would oblige you to stay inside the city
• 2 days are enough to visit Petra so travelers can spend the rest of the week discovering the south region
• Travelers are looking for at least 3* hotels and can spend between 1 000 and 1 200€ for the week (flight-hotel-car rental)

Benchmarking

I decided to test three travel planning apps : Hopper, Skyscanner and Tripadvisor.
My choice were pretty easy since Hopper was really simple, it’s only possible to reserve flight on it so I excluded it right away.
Then it was between the two others. TripAdvisor was, at the first look a bit complex since it allows many things : flight / hotel / appartment reservations, it shows you was to do in your area, it suggests restaurants and there is also a forum. Also, a lot a people use it for rating and to see recommandations.
Despite being quite complete TripAdvisor lacks of a car rental tool which is essential for travelers.
Finally I decided to use Skyscanner which is composed of the core tools needed for this travel : flight booking, hotel reservation and car rental.

Testing

The three people I interviewed were around 25 for two of them and 40 y-o.
I noticed a lot of similarities concerning the 5 seconds test. All 3 understood what the app was about from the first look and were able to describe the home page with accuracy as it’s design is minimalist.
Concerning the second part, a lot of similarities were noticable between my three interviews as Skyscanner seemed to be intuitive for them all.
One of my specimen struggled with finding suitable hotel on the map because there is no filter button displayed there anymore so he had to click on every single hotel to find the right one.
On another intervewee was disapointed not being able to book a flight and a hotel together in one pack such as in a travel agency. This is the point I worked on because I think that,a lot of people don’t want to spend much time buying flights and hotels separately even though it’s a little more expensive to buy a pack.

A possible solution

I decided first to add a “Flights + hotels” button on the Home scrren.

Then you simply need to fill up your departure airport, the destination you are heading to and the number of people to get to the flight+hotel bundle list.
From here you can easily sort out the most suitable offer for you with filters.
I split the filter window in two parts : one for filters related to hotels ( number of stars, cancellation plan and breakfast) and one related to flights (airlines, number of stops, flight duration).
Finally, when the user selects a bundle he is directed to a page where he can read details about the place and reviews from other travelers. other flight offer to match this given hotel to anopther flight. Below, the app displays other flight offer so that the user can match up the selected hotel with another flight.

…a video always more explicit than thousand words…

Learnings

Overall I learnt a lot through this challenge. It was first quite tricky for me to figure out what would be the better feature improvement for the application. Hopefully it turned out that interviews helped me a lot in the way that external points of view always bring details you didn’t even notive because there is no one only way to use an app.