Ironhack’s Prework: ClaraTorvà_Challenge 3
Travelling is a way of life. People feel free, happy and curious while they travel, they can travel in so many ways and to so many places, that in the end, travel becomes just another way of living.
The evolution of technology has made travel available to everyone, without the need for agencies or intermediaries, only with a mobile application, you can organize your ideal trip around the world. There are millions of travel applications such as: Kayac, Skyscanner, TripAdvisor, Hopper, but today, we will focus on Tripadvisor.
What is TripAdvisor?
TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel platform, helps 463 million travelers every month to make their trip the best it can be. Travellers around the world use the Tripadvisor website and application to consult over 859 million comments and opinions from 8.6 million accommodations, restaurants, experiences, flights and cruises. At any time travellers can use Tripadvisor to compare low prices on hotels, flights and cruises, book tours and popular attractions, as well as book tables at excellent restaurants. It is available in 49 markets and 28 languages.
Who are the users?
We have focused our study on a typology of user, a small group of friends between 40 and 60 years old, who decide to make an adventure through the most precious sites in the world and prioritize more the exclusivity and quality than the cost.
The users tell us that their plan is to travel around Italy, visiting the most beautiful Romanesque cities, learning their history and culture, and above all, eating very well. They all live in the city of Barcelona so they would leave from the airport of El Prat to the airport of Rome, their first destination, from there they would hire a comfortable car to be able to move around Italy (Florence, Venice) with tranquillity and autonomy. They have no medical needs and the comfort of not having to change currency or apply for a visa gives them a certain peace of mind. They only have to pack their most comfortable outfits during the day and some more elegant clothes to get to know the city at night.
TripAdvisor is an ideal application for them, because it allows them to find flights and hotels, book cars and find activities to do on culture, history, as well as filtering by restaurant so they can find the most exquisite ones.
What our users think?
Within this class of users, three interviews have been carried out with users about the mobile application (Iphone) of Tripadvisor. We started with the 5-second test, where each user was shown the home page for 5 seconds, and then we asked them:
What did you see first?
What did you see on the screen?
What do you think this app can do?
Then we conducted a more extensive interview, between 20 and 30 minutes, with each of the users to accompany us during different stages to complete the journey of his trip, while detecting what are the pain points of the application and what points of improvement we can define:
- During the 5 second test, we observed that the main page is very full of content and users cannot focus on their task
- They don’t understand the difference between the Hotel and the Holiday Rentals, it takes their focus off
- There is no section for a combined hotel + flight search
- The booking process is very confusing. They have to go through several screens before actually making the reservation.
- The type of cancellation is not included in the filters, making it more difficult to search from the beginning
- When establishing the days for the flight, users have no option to see the best days to pick in order to have the best price.
- When users want to book an excursion within Rome, the process of booking is not clear at all. They have to scroll a lot on the screen because they receive too much information
- When making the purchase, the app redirects them to the operators’ website to finish the process. This disconcerts the user, thinking that perhaps the redirected source is not as reliable as TripAdvisor.
- At no time have they been able to find out in what way, or where, there are car rental options, but from the web, there is the possibility.
- When searching for restaurants they cannot apply any kind of filter, so makes it very difficult for them to find.
What is the most important problem?
The home page is the face of the application, it is the entrance door for the user and after the test and the interview, we have observed that it generates some stress. There is a lot of information and users cannot focus on their objective. They need it to be more clear and concise, with the steps marked. Another very important problem, commented on by all the users, was the redirection to other web portals when wanting to book, the user does not feel comfortable or relaxed, there should be an option to carry out the whole process from the application.
Finally, other significant problems were: the lack of filtering of restaurants and the frustration of not finding any car hire service. In addition, although money was not a problem for our users, they missed being able to see in the calendar which dates are the best prices.
These are the problems that will be taken into account for the next phase of prototyping, but we will try to solve all of them.
Redesign of the app
After listening, analyzing and understanding all the information from the users, we redesigned those pages that were more complex based on the problems that the users told us about. The redesign was done using Wireframes on Figma.
- Home Page: We have reduced the level of information on the home page, making it clearer and more intuitive for the user. We have also add the option to Rent a Car directly through the app and combined the Hotels and Holidays Rentals
2. Calendar Page: In the calendar, we have added the possibility to visually see which are the most expensive days and which are the days where the price is cheaper.
Search Page: We have made some small adjustments to the page where the hotels are shown. Users told us that the font size was small and they could not see that they would be redirected to another website to follow their purchase.
Restaurant Page: We have added a section of filters in the restaurants page, so that the search is faster and the users can choose the price, the area, the type of food, etc.
Conclusion
In this exercise I have realized that the first impression is very important (5 seconds test), and that testing with users is 100% necessary to define the correct use and interaction of the app.
During all the lessons we learn that in the end everything is a cumulative process, where we always empathise, analyse, define, ideate, test, redefine, etc.
So let’s keep learning and practicing.
