Tag: Travel

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Individual Assignment 3: Representative User Test

Identify Website: Trip Advisor

The site for testing our group chose is Trip Advisor. Trip Advisor is a travel information and booking site that helps many users book their vacations and find accommodations. On the site, you can view hotels, flights restaurants, vacation rentals, things to do, rental cars, etc. This site is definitely used more to view different activities and sites to see on vacation rather than booking due to competitors such as Booking.com.

Tester Characteristics:

I could not find a direct match to our group’s tester characteristic of a 42-year-old female with three children in the Miami area; however, I did find a close enough match.

This tester is a 45-year-old female married with two children in college. The user is from the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area and is a very avid traveler. For work, she is an accountant for a doctor’s office and has been an accountant for over 10 years. With her birthday coming up she wants to travel to Spain for the first time. For this trip, it will be a family of 4 total for the whole trip. The user is very used to dealing with travel sites and enjoys them, but never books through them regularly. The user is looking to travel from Miami, FL on Friday, February 17th, and looking to be back on Sunday, February 26. The coming back is a hard set date that cannot be changed, but the flight for going can be semi-flexible but it will only be able to be on either Thursday, the 16th, or Friday, the 17th. She does not have any preferences on where to stay, but she would like a decent hotel with decent pricing. She does have recommendations from friends that have gone to Spain, so she will not be going completely blind, but it still will be the family’s first time traveling to Europe. The user would love to see different activities that the family can do and food options. One of her children is a bit selective of meals, so being able to view the menu beforehand in the different areas will help tremendously. The user is not the best in technology usage but has navigated through many travel sites before.

User Tester Method:

This testing was done using the Thinking Aloud approach. As I sat with the user, I watched what she did and told her to speak out loud about anything that comes to mind. With every step, I screenshotted and wrote down what was said about each step the user took. It was much easier being in the same room as the user since I could see the movements they would make. I observed their eyes, hands, and what reaction they would have when switching pages and reading about each entity.

Modification to Assigned Tasks:

Given the different scenarios for the user we created and this user, we had to modify a few of the tasks, but they will have overall the same objective. You will see below the original group task and the modified task.

Group Task 1: Find a cruise when the kids are on break from school and taking in consideration of hurricane season and to stay within the vacation budget.  

Modified Task 1: Find a flight round trip from Miami, FL to Madrid, Spain. User is open on budget, but would prefer a cheaper option if possible. The flight is preferred to be direct rather than layovers.

Group Task 2: Pick a cruise that stops in multiple ports.

Modified Task 2: Find transportation from Madrid to Barcelona, Barcelona to Valencia, and Valencia to Madrid.

Group Task 3: Find activities offered in each port stop.

Modified Task 3: Find hotels near Madrid (Feb. 18- 21), Barcelona (Feb. 21-23), and Valencia(Feb. 23- 26).

Group Task 4: N/A

Modified Task 4: Find activities/ excursion in each city.

Task Analysis:

Task 1: Find a flight round trip from Miami, FL to Madrid, Spain. User is open on budget, but would prefer a cheaper option if possible. The flight is preferred to be direct rather than layovers.

Once on the page, the user took about 30 seconds to just look over the page and see what was on it. They clicked on the “Where to” on the homepage and searched up Madrid, Spain. There was a drop down menu that showed up, but nothing of flights. The user was confused, and they tried to search up in other ways, such as “Spain”, “Flights to Madrid”, and nothing came up (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1

They exited out of the search and clicked on the “More” option on the homepage. The user thought aloud and wondered why a travel site did not have the flights option at least showing on the homepage. It took the user to a different Trip Advisor webpage where it shows flight information. A nice touch the user saw was when inputting the flight information, there was an option to also see compared prices with other travel sites such as Kayak, Cheap Flights, Wowfare, etc (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2

The results after searching up the depart for Friday, February 17 (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3

User decided to choose the first option to be able to land in Madrid, Spain by 7:45 am on Saturday, February 18. The user was also able to click the “View Deal” option and it showed her the full flight information with the exact times (Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4

Task 2: Find transportation from Madrid to Barcelona, Barcelona to Valencia, and Valencia to Madrid.

The user is going to be traveling within Spain so she needs to find transportation for all the cities they will be visiting. The user saw the option of multi-city in the flights area so they inputted all the cities and dates. The user did not like how you can only put up to 4 cities that you want to travel (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1

The user had to write down the first flight since they were planning on staying in Madrid a few days. It worked out on her end after she realized she didn’t need the original flight, but she does believe it would be better with more flights just fro travel purposes. Once the user inputted all the flights and clicked the search button, only two flights showed up (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2

Task 3: Find hotels near Madrid (Feb. 18- 21), Barcelona (Feb. 21-23), and Valencia(Feb. 23- 26).

With every city the user visits, they need a hotel to stay in. The user is looking for a safe and comfortable place to be in while they are visiting Spain. Sinc etehy ar enot planning to be in the hotel until nighttime to sleep, the most precious and expensive hotel is not needed. The user clicked on the “Hotels” option they had was set up the same way as the flights. The user scanned the options you can use to filter out the choices, but decided to just view everything first before trying to narrow down on hotels. After viewing all the options, the user decided the most important options were free WIFI and free breakfast. One thing the user noticed was that it would take them to Booking.com,when viewing the hotel deals (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1

Task 4: Find activities/ excursion in each city.

After looking at the hotels, flights, and each city, the user wanted to look at what activities and site seeing places were near the hotel/city. The user is very big on adventure so this was very important to view them beforehand and see reviews. The user thought it was nice that in each city there was a drop down menu of different topics right off the bat (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1

The user clicked on “Things to Do in Barcelona” and a whole page of things popped up. They had it organized in different types of tours, what time of day, and the most popular. The user enjoyed how you can also view the standard price before you click on the activity (Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2

Reccomendations

After al the tasks, I had the user tell me what recommendations they would want if they could change the site. The first one was to fix the main homepage drop downs. As seen in task 1, the site has a search button but when you search up flights it does not go through. The flights option was in the “More” tab. If the main options such as hotel, flights, things to do, and packages were the main feature of the webpage it would make much more sense. Users come to this travel site to view everything surrounding travel, and flights are a huge aspect of travel.

The next recommendation was that theuser would want more option when trying to book multi-city flights. It was snot a big problem for her, but for some users that needs to book multiple flights it would work out much better. There could be certain layovers that a user wants to have for a certain amount of days, and not having the actual opportunity to input them all loses time and user will go to other sites instead.

Word Count: 1530

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Individual Assignment #2 – Heuristic Evaluation

The Website

The website I selected for this assignment was atlasobscura.com. The website’s tagline is “The definitive guide to the world’s hidden wonders.” and users can search for destinations, experiences, food to try, and read stories about different places. The website features destinations that are popular as well as some out-of-the-box destinations/experiences.

Home page of atlasobscura.com

The Scenario

The scenario I chose to evaluate for this website is that I am visiting New Orleans and I want to plan out what attractions to go to. For the scenario, I do not have any food restrictions/allergies and everyone is over 21 years old. Nielsen’s 10 heuristics will be used in the evaluation of this website.

To begin the scenario I decided to search New Orleans in the search bar located on the home page. As I was typing, the search was continuously updated as I typed. For instance, when I had typed out “new” before “Orleans” it recommended destination guides for New York State, New York City, etc., it recommended places such as The New Orleans Treehouse and the New Yorker Hotel, and even a story about New Zealand.

A partial search of “new”

As I finished typing out “new orleans” the search results pulled together the results for information related to New Orleans. The results were broken down into different categories including “Destination Guides”, “Trips”, “Places”, “Food & Drink”, and “Stories”.

A search of “New Orleans”

Instead of clicking any result listed in the search I just hit the enter button which led to “The Atlas Obscura Guide to New Orleans” which I believe is the same page as the “New Orleans, Louisiana” result that showed up under “Destination Guides”. This page had been recently updated in July of 2022 and featured quick links (“Attractions”, “Food & Drink”, “Map”, “Leaderboards”, “Stories”, and “Lists”) that would take you to that part of the page when clicked.

The Atlas Obscura Guide to New Orleans front page

The first task was to pick out 2-3 attractions to visit while in the city. I was able to click a button under the “Unusual Attractions in New Orleans” section that led to another webpage which listed all the places in New Orleans that were added to the website. From that webpage I browsed the different options and settled on three different places to visit (Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo, Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, and New Orleans Pharmacy Museum).

All places in New Orleans webpage

I clicked on one of the attractions I wanted to visit and it took me to a webpage dedicated to that attraction. On this webpage it gave a quick description of what the attraction was, a map of the location and the address, as well as a link to the website and nearby attractions.

Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop webpage

Usability Flaws

While working through this scenario the overall process was relatively easy but some issues were present. When searching for “New Orleans” in the search bar it was constantly updating to try to find the best match based off each individual key stroke. This led to an overload of information that was constantly changing which is a violation of Nielsen’s 8th heuristic. Another violation occured when I clicked on “Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop”. This led me to a new webpage dedicated to this attraction but did not provide a back button (which can be seen in the “All places in New Orleans” screenshot). This violates Nielsen’s 3rd heuristic.

Recommendations

Overall, this website was easy to use and was formatted and designed in a way that made sense as a user. I also acknowledge that I am not a novice when it comes to using computers, the internet, and searching webpages. One of the first recommendations I have is to not have the search automatically update results with every keystroke. I know that this is what is used in most search engines but I think for this specific site it makes sense to wait until the user is done typing their search term so they do not get overwhelmed with unrelated results. Another recommendation I have is to create a back link that would take you from an attractions webpage back to the webpage with all of the attractions. This could be a link just like the one seen on the “All places in New Orelans” webpage that is in the left hand corner of the screen (“BACK TO NEW ORLEANS”) but with the wording “BACK TO ALL PLACES IN NEW ORLEANS”. This would provide the user with an easier way to get back to the previous page.

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Individual Assignment 2: Heuristic Evaluation

The Website

I chose to do a heuristic evaluation on one of our travel sites, Hotels.com. As an avid traveler, finding a place to stay in is a hard part of a vacation with many different new sites coming up such as Airbnb, Trivago, Expedia, etc. The website specializes in booking hotels, rental cars, and vacation rentals.

Method

In evaluating this website, I took the approach of navigating through the site first and looking at how it works as I have used it before but it is not a regular site I use to book trips. I used the 10 principles of Jakob Nielson’s approach for usability analysis and checked off each one to see which ones had flaws. I went step by step as if I were booking a trip to view the different outcomes of the prices and how the page gets set up when you input a new travel date. I decided to choose the travel destination as New York City and the dates will be during Thanksgiving week, November 22-27.

Usability Flaws

So on the homepage of Hotels.com, it seems very easy to navigate and has a lot of information on the main page. At the top of the screen, you can effortlessly search different locations and dates. Once you scroll down it has some information on different ways to travel and stays. So on the homepage, I input the travel stays I will be looking into which is New York City from November 22 – 27.

So once I searched up the travel plan, it showed me a list of different hotels with the price showing next to the hotel and a small description of the hotel. You can choose different filters and assortment to your liking. In the image below, I scrolled down a bit and you see some good deals labeled as “Secret Price available”.

I clicked on the Westin New York Grand Central hotel to see how it worked since it was such a big price jump. When clicked on, it sent me to a different tab which violates the 6th heuristic of recognition rather than recall. This means that a user should not have to remember dates and there should also be a back button to correct any mistake if made. If the user was one that does not understand different tabs then this would be a big problem for them. I can see how if you end up on a new tab, you are going to start a whole new search and it is just repeating all the steps. I went on my phone as well to see if it opened a new tab or not and it did. This means that the user will have to keep switching between tabs to view each and every hotel.

Another violation was number 7, Flexibility and efficiency of use. An expert at tabs and the internet know they can switch between tabs and if need be they can close the tab. However, a newer user may not know that information and since each time you click on a hotel it opens up a new tab. A user may not know that they can either close the tab or navigate to the original tab. They might start the same search again which lose the efficiency of the website. Rather than it being a quick and easy task, it might take a while to view each hotel and its amenities.

Design Recommendations

I recommend that this website has more flexibility for more novice users but also for anybody that travels which is a majority of the population. Hotels.com does have great options and outcomes, but the design of opening a new tab every time you press on a new hotel can get exhaustive and causes a slower performance. There should be a way that a person can review the hotel they want and see it with the option of going back but also having that hotel in a recently viewed box if you want to keep browsing different hotels. This recommendation will solve both heuristic flaws, 6 and 7, which have to do with remembering what was searched and which hotels were viewed, as well as, navigating through the different tabs that allow you to know what information you viewed beforehand.

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Individual Assignment #2 (Hopper)

For my travel site I chose to review the app “Hopper,” due to its wide popularity and claims to provide the best possible deals. Hopper is a travel application designed simply to find users the best deals on flights and hotels. I recently came back from a trip to Aruba and booked my stay via AMEX travel for the hotel (Expedia) and directly through Delta.com for the flight. For this heuristic scenario, I have decided to book the same exact trip from beginning to end through Hopper and compare experiences and review hopper.com utilizing Jakob Nielsen’s 10 guiding principles.

First things first, I can’t use my laptop or desktop to book my trip?! Forcing a traveler to use their cell phone to book the entirety of their trip violates rules #4: Consistency and Standards and #7: flexibility and efficiency of use. The rule of consistency and standards states that an application should follow industry best practices, which in this situation would be to offer both mobile app booking as well as the ability to book on a website. Older users are much less likely to book a trip on their mobile devices than they are their desktop computers. The mobile application shrinks everything, which creates sensory overload for an app that depends on advertisements and a mass amount of options. The rule of flexibility and efficiency of use states that a user can personalize and customize their application. The fact that a user can only use their mobile application violates the principle of flexibility. Additionally, at no point was I able to customize or personalize my experience. In fact, I was only asked to create my account at the end of the experience right at the payment method step.

Moving on to booking my flight along with my hotel for the duration of my trip. This process was overwhelming. Again, an abundance of information all on a small screen was overwhelming and made for a stressful booking experience. I didn’t feel as though I was getting the best deal and didn’t find a way to combine booking my hotel and flight in the same process as I am accustomed to while using Expedia or similar sites. At the end of my booking experience I took to the airline and hotel websites directly and found cheaper rates! For a first time user this wasn’t a reassuring experience. Frankly, this is the point where I would delete the mobile app if this wasn’t for a graded assignment. These errors clearly violate the principles of aesthetic and minimalist design. More is less and in this case the UX designers need to reevaluate their mobile application layout. The designers need to be sure to make strong recommendations for the best possible flight/ hotel combination as well as the ability to book the both during the same process.

The final step that never happened were the recommendations. I was under the impression the Hopper app was the best at telling a user they weren’t booking the best deal, at the best price, at the best time. I was looking forward to the, “hey guy! don’t book this now! you can do better!” moment. This step violated the final principle, which is help. I was going to book a trip for way more than I should’ve and the app never helped me stop or even slow down. The app needs to have an automated help feature to assist the user with booking the best deal.

The Hopper concept is great and definitely one that had me thinking about using their product in the future. In order to more closely follow Nielsen’s heuristics principles, the developers can make a few significant changes. First, the developers need to bring the booking to desktop applications. By doing so, they’ll spread out their crowded interface and make the booking process easier for users accustomed to only booking trips using their preferred search engine. Second, if they’re stuck on solely using a mobile application they’ll need to reduce the amount of content each page has to display. Make it so a user can add to options as opposed to having them all laid out right from the beginning. I want to be able to do everything I can on this application as I can using a specific hotel or airline vendor. Points is life for frequent travelers and in order to stay relevant, Hopper should align their organization with other travel companies in order to provide the additional option of rewards points. Lastly, the application needs to constantly tell a user when they’re choosing the best deal at the best value. People use the Hopper app for helpful recommendations, they need to make sure a user is well-informed when making a poor decision, which is the helpful feature to ensure a user is making the best use of the product.

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Individual Assignment 2: Heuristic Evaluation

The Website

The website that I want to perform a heuristic evaluation on is Zomato. The platform of this website is for searching and discovering restaurants; reading and writing reviews; ordering food delivery; booking a table; and making payments while dining-out at restaurants (I think the last three services are for an app feature – the site was not specific about it).

Method

The evaluation method was browsing the website while keeping tabs on the usability flaws. After getting familiar with Jakob Nielsen’s 10 general principles for interaction design, I went back to where I found the usability flaws and connected each one that I found.

Usability Flaws

Visibility of the System Status

The flaw that I found with this heuristic is the search bar. The first thing that welcomes you when you get to the site is the search bar. But the problem is, it is already showing the last place that I did a search. It can’t be deleted or cleared, and can’t be removed by clearing the browser’s history. Another problem with it is that when you type your location and hit enter, it just looks like nothing happened. A few tabs at the bottom show up, but not what I am looking for (the list of restaurants). The third is the right-side of the search bar. When I first browsed the site, I thought I could search for any keyword on the search bar. But after careful inspection, you must enter a location and then do a search that pertains to a restaurant, cuisine, or a dish. I call this a flaw because people go to a site and do a search on a search bar, not enter a location, and follow the next direction, which, by the way, there is no direction.

This is a violation of the “visibility of the system status” because the site is supposed to always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time, and clearly this site doesn’t.

Match Between System and Real World

After entering the site, once you scroll down from the search button, you will see “Popular localities in and around Venice, Florida” (remember the previous searched location is automatically inputted). The word “localities” caught my attention because I am not looking for a particular place, but a place to dine.

This violated the usability heuristic “match between system and the real world” because it did not ensure that the user’s understanding of the word match the understanding of the programmers.

User Control and Freedom

So, I was finally able to search for restaurants. When I click on a specific one, it takes me to the restaurant’s profile. But there is no way of going back to the previous page, which is the results. To go back, I must press the back arrow button, or at the top of the image of the loaded curly fries, there is a directory type of addressing. You can click on any part of the directory and hope that you will land back where you want to go back. The problem with that is that not a lot of users can understand that.

The “no return button” is a violation of the usability heuristic “user control and freedom” because there is no clear way of exiting the current interaction.

Flexibility and Efficiency of Use

I noticed that in the search results there is no way to pick different restaurants and compare them, nor is there any way to personalize the view. The design is stuck on three columns and endless scrolling (if there are a lot of results – like searching a rural area). So, if you want to get to the bottom of the page, you scroll to what you think is the bottom of the page, but when you hit the bottom, it will load more results. When I searched for restaurants in Cebu City, Philippines, it kept doing that for at least five times. The design is not very convenient and it is annoying to get to the bottom of the page.

These violated the heuristic “flexibility and efficiency of use” because they don’t provide a way to personalize the functionality and they don’t allow customization on how the user wants the product to work.

Help and Documentation

There isn’t a help button, or I can’t find it.

This violated the last usability heuristic because a site needs to have documentation in context right at the moment the user requires it.

Recommendations

Visibility of the System Status

Since the site is already known for restaurant reviews, I recommend that the search bar be set to search full sentences, like “the best place to eat in Sarasota”. People already visit the site because they are looking for a good place to eat, so by doing so, they should get a list of restaurants. Or they can at least have a talking bubble to direct you to the process of getting search results (instructions).

Match Between System and Real World

I recommend changing the label to “restaurants and bars in the neighboring area”. This way, people will know that the section is still relevant to their search.

User Control and Freedom

For this usability flaw, I recommend a clear exit path. It must be correctly labelled and easy to find.

Flexibility and Efficiency of Use

For these flaws, I recommend adding an option/button for the users to change the view of the results, and adding a list view will solve the never-ending scrolling.

Help and Documentation

Add a “help button” to help users when they require it.