Applying Usability Evaluation and Site Redesign — Case: TripAdvisor

Coming up with the last challenge, this is article 3of 3, from the Ironhack UX/UI Bootcamp prework, that I am part of.

For this challenge, we were requested to select, one of the very touristic places listed on the brief, and work with a pre-select persona for that. With the context in hand, the next step was to select one of many different travel apps — after a benchmarked analysis — and run a Heuristic evaluation from Nielsen’s Principals. From this analysis, I ended up finding out pain points and areas for improvement and proposing a Site Redesign. Follow up until the end of this article to find out about my resolutions.

The Context:

The Personas:

The Background — Family w/ children — 30–50 y/o(4)
Next year family vacation is going to be BIG. You want to take your children to know all the world’s wonders, but you need to start with one. Because your children have different needs and cannot keep up with only doing tourism, look for a good place to stay and relax. You assumed this is going to be quite an expense but you’re looking for opportunities if there would be any.

The Destination — Mexico-Riviera Maya:

Mexico is well known for the Mexican beach paradise. With many destinations, they have something to offer for all the members of a family.
Additional to the beach holiday, the region of Riviera Maya is rich in culture and adventure. The Yucatan Peninsula has active archeological sites, azures rivers running beneath the ground, and jungle adventure parks. To summarize, it is THE TRUE getaway fun for a family.

Some additional information specific to this holiday destination:

Nearest airport: Cancun International Airport
Currency: Dollar and Mexican Peso
Medical needs: Some nationalities require previous vaccination and visa application before the traveling day.
Days needed to visit attractions: Research shows that 7 to 14 days is a good amount of time to enjoy the region.

Benchmarking:

I used the 10 Usability Heuristics Evaluations, from Nielsen Norman Group, to help me validate which one of the listed apps would be a good match for the proposed context:

-Hopper
-TripAdvisor
-Kayak
-SkyScanner

The 10 Heuristics principles used for the Apps evaluations:

1. Users should always be informed of what the system, or product is doing, in a reasonable timeline.
2. Users should always be informed of what the system, or product is doing, in a reasonable timeline.
3. Mistakes can happen, provide a way out when they do.
4. Users understand conventions and patterns, and should not have to guess as to what something means. Follow patterns that exist across platforms.
5. Providing feedback when an error occurs is important, but better yet if you can help prevent an error from occurring in the first place.
6. Avoid hiding important actions behind menus, and instead present options in a visible way so users don’t have to remember where they are.
7. Provide ways of speeding up workflows, and accelerating users familiar with the system, while guiding those less familiar.
8. Keep screens and dialogues focused and minimal to maximize visibility and clarity.
9. Errors will occur, and it is important to help users understand what caused the error, in plain language, and how they can go about rectifying the situation.
10. Don’t make users struggle to find help, and where possible present it contextually as needed, in plain, clear language.

After conducting the Evaluation, I concluded that TripAdvisor was the best match for the context listed above. Among the positives points that the platform offers, what stood out the most for this exercise, were:

• An area dedicated to plan your trip and save useful information and links.
• An area dedicated to saving hotels, restaurants, and things to do.
• An area to save and visualize upcoming bookings.

The tests:

I run the 5 seconds test with 3 users, to find out the pain points and areas for improvements. With this test I could gather what information could be missing in the app.

I asked the users the questions below:

1. What is being shown on the screens?
2. What is this app for?
3. What did you see on the screens?
4. Where would you go to start creating your trip plan?

The answers from the 3 users were quite similar. They could understand that the app was related to planning a trip and that these screens were to search and plan it. They recall having seen features to create a trip, a card with the created trip, and options to add content to the planned trip.

After the 5 seconds test, I asked the users to explore the app a bit. I asked them to complete the task of creating a trip, and plan to select things, such as restaurants and hotels. So I asked them to add these contents to the trip planning area.

Insights from the test:

While they were executing the tasks they reported have missed tag options, and filters. 2 out 3 of the users said that they would like to have the option to see the cards separated by categories, Such as “hotels” and “restaurants”. Also, they missed the fact that they would like to have seen suggestions for the trip they were planning. The “plan a trip” section offers the search tab, but for that, you need to know what you are looking for. The users asked that they would like to know what were the option available for that area.

The Redesign:

After evaluating the users’ answers, the next step was to ideate the solution for their biggest complaints: Add categories to the selected items in the Planned trip section, and add a “suggestion” search tab.

The Categories addition:

The Suggestion tab addition:

What I have learned from this process:

Running the user tests was essential to end up with areas for improvement. It is dangerous for us, designers, to assume some solution based on our bias ideas. It is crucial for the right progress of the product to validate, through research and tests with the users, what are their limitations while using the app. After I finished the tests, I noticed that I could have used other tools to help gather more valuable insights.

For my next exercise, I would like to use other research tools such as Mindmaps and use some measurements of behavior, as the task-ease rating. Also, I would do another round of tests to validate my proposed changes.