Challenge 3: Usability Evaluation and Site Redesign

Using Heuristics to accomplish a better travel experience

1. User Type

For this Challenge I choose the Small group of friends:

Small group of friends — 40–60 y/o (3)
You and your lifelong friends decided to go on an adventure together, to delight yourself with the world’s most exquisite wonders. You ponder better exclusivity and quality over a lower price. You all want to feel comfortable, leave time and space for everyone to fulfill their personal desires.

2. Research

Pablo 45,Irene 46 and Jaime 49 are a group of friends from Barcelona and they decided they want to visit the Rome coliseum in the less stressful way.

• Nearest airport: Fiumicino (FCO) Airport. is the main airport in Rome, located about 35km from the city center. Fiumicino is one of the largest international airports in Italy, and in 2018 it served more than 43 million passengers.
• Currency and exchange rate: Euro, same currency.
• Medical needs: The group has it’s own medical travel assistance and vaccines are not needed on this country.
• Dress code: Depending on weather. Mediterranean temperatures are pretty mild in winter and quite hot in summer.
• Days needed to visit: 1 day at the Coliseum plus 2 days to visit the city.

3. Benchmarking

Having in mind my user, the needs and tools they will need I decided to benchmark the services each platform provides to the user.

In this case, my user “Young group of friends” needs to have as much tips as possible for the trip, after this benchmark Trip Advisor popped on top of the other platforms for it’s extra tips and experiences you can book with this single App. In my opinion this will make a much easier and better experience for my user.

4. Testing

After interviewing my users I discovered their budgets and their needs.

I gave them the next task: Find a Hotel within your budget and as close as possible to the Coliseum.

5. Insights

This is the current flow according to the users tasks I have had create:

The first step they replicated was to click in the “Hotels” button, type the name of the city and add the dates.

From this point some of them went to filter their budget in the “filter” button, witch they all succeed in.

After this point the users tried to find the closer Hotel to the Coliseum which became a Pain point. I observed that the actions of the users were based on zooming into the map in order to find a sign or some visual info regarding the Coliseum. This leads them into a great frustration, some of them mentioned the possibility of opening a google maps on a parallel tab.

A couple of users (2/5) were able to find the “Show surroundings” button on the map, but they still not found solution for the designated task inside this menu.

None of the users found the way to get a close Hotel to the Coliseum, which was inside the “filter” button and at the bottom of this scroll menu.

POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENTS:

I found a couple of solutions to fix this issue:

• Add icons in the map :

Pro: This solution would be fast and visual.

Cons: This would make an already crowded map a bit more confusing.

• Change the “Show surroundings” Button into a Floating icon of an “eye” button in a more obvious position:

Pro: Adding in to this menu a distance bar and a big list of places people would like to visit, with a check box for each of them.
Con: I would have to test if this solution it’s doable.

6. Redesign Wireframes

We can see the “eye” button on the top left part of the map.

Once we press into it we can see a menu with check boxes with the info we need to locate places inside the map.

We select the boxes we want to visualize and press the “Show” button.

After this we would see the icons we wanted to localize on the map.