This is the third and final challenge for my Ironhack prework. The exercise consisted in redesigning a travel application, based on a group of people with a profile of our choice.
1. User Type
We had to choose between several travellers profiles, I decided to go with the group of friends (20–40yo). And these guys really want to visit Rome, especially the Colosseum, after 14 months in lockdown because of Covid.
2. Research
- Nearest airport / most convenient airport to the destination: Leonardo da Vinci di Roma Fiumicino airport
- Currency and exchange from your own currency: Italy is in the European Union and the currency used is the Euro. (1$=0,82€)
- Vaccination, visa, etc.: Diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, they are constantly in demand in the European Union. Our group of friends, if they are a bit responsible, should not have any worries about this.
- Wardrobe recommendations: It’s summer, so it’s normally quite hot in Rome. Of course, you are never safe from rain and thunderstorms, which rarely occur in the afternoon. So you need a wardrobe for the sometimes fickle Mediterranean climate, at least with a raincoat and a warm garment. Moreover, it is preferable to have two different pairs of shoes, one for lazing around like sandals and the other for walking, because the slippery cobblestones will not do tourists any favors.
- Days needed to visit attraction: At least 3 days in the capital because even if the Colosseum is the main attraction, it would be a shame to miss the open air museum that is Rome. There are many ancient ruins to visit in the centre and in the surrounding area. A great opportunity for history lovers.
3. Benchmarking
I had to use heuristic evaluation and evaluate three different travel applications. I chose Hopper, Kayak (NB: initially I intended to review TripAdvisor, but it seems that they have completely removed the ability to search for flights on their (French, at least) application) and SkyScanner.
After the evaluation, it looks that the worst performing application is Hopper even though I think this is the nicest UI, the colours are warm, playful and already evoke a little holiday feeling. But this is proof that UI and UX are two totally different things, so let’s see how we can combine the two to make a better application while keeping that shimmer.
It seems confusing to navigate through, there is too much information. I also noticed that the French Hopper application was in both English and French (?) which is not a problem for bilingual users but my people, as much as I love them, are not known for their ability to speak foreign languages.
4. Testing
I interviews 4 users between the ages of 27 and 35. At the beginning each user saw the Hopper start screen for just 5 seconds (here). Then I asked each of them these questions:
- What did you see?
- What can this tool do for you?
- Where would you search for a flight?
Because the interviewees were French and for the reasons mentioned above, I conducted these conversations in French.
- All users noted that this was a travel application. The majority answered “find cheap travel”.
- One of the interviewees replied that he preferred to go directly to the airlines’ websites. The others all gave me names of flight aggregators (eDreams, SkyScanner, Google flights…)
- They all told me “We don’t understand what’s down there in the footer (ads?) and also, what is wrong with the carrot ?” (This is the money set aside when booking flights with the app but it makes no sense to put it here, especially in this form)
Tasks:
- As we are not far from Rome, the budget for a round trip flight for this summer was 150€ per person.
- They had to find accommodation for 5 people, for a week, at a maximum of 700€ or 140€ per person.
- Ideally to be able to see everything in Rome and given the very touristy and sometimes crowded sides, it is best to walk.
- With Covid it is best to think about reserving slots to visit such places.
Everyone was able to get to their flight in a timely manner, but the experience was sometimes laborious. “And now I’m booking a hotel too? I don’t understand. I don’t even know if it’s worth it budget-wise or if I should take the flight and rental at the same time…”.
One of them told me that he hated organising trips and that he would have liked to have an option to be able to take tickets for the Colosseum directly in the application. I found this interesting and am thinking of including a feature in the app that would allow this to happen.
5. Insight
I have identified several pain points that need to be resolved. Here they are, along with my solutions :
- The homepage is too cluttered, users do not understand the presence of the carrot, very prominent in the centre of the screen. It’s the first thing you see. There’s too much information, it’s not very clear, no one understands the footer and there’s an illustration in the middle that disrupts the experience. So I decided to move down and simplify the illustration to a place where nobody goes (the footer) so that no information is lost. I also changed the last minutes deals, putting bigger pictures (Airbnb inspiration) and changed the wording. The buttons (search for a flight, rent a car…) are now highlighted, and underneath you can find your most recent searches.
- The flight search screen is quite classic and efficient, although I find it a bother to have to open another page to be able to search and it’s not easy to return to the home page if you want to rent a car instead.
- The small colored squares are interesting to get an overview, but I found it chaotic to find yourself immediately in this mass of information. I preferred to duplicate the process by proposing a screen with a choice already made by an algorithm according to the choices made on the previous screen. However, if this one doesn’t suit you, you can always pull down the screen and see these little squares
- Finally, users did not seem to understand why there was no summary of the selected flight in the last screen (it is there, at the very top, but it is not very visible nor exhaustive). This is now done!
6. Learnings
Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the full scope of the heuristic evaluation, I think I missed some of the subtleties to be more effective, there are some marks I gave a bit randomly without really knowing what to refer to. This is the first challenge where I feel that my knowledge as a designer was (almost) useless. However, it did help me to better understand the usability of the applications.
After the analysis I had more or less an idea of what could be improved. The interviews helped me to see a bit more clearly. I think I made a lot of mistakes, both in UI and UX but I had too many ideas and they didn’t necessarily all fit at the same time. However, I had a lot of fun because I love this application and I’ve been using it for a long time. I also had some frustrations with Figma because I know there are some features present but I had no idea how to use them despite reading tutorials on the internet. I can’t wait to learn more about it because it’s an extremely powerful piece of software (I hope no one goes digging through my source files because it’s a mess, I haven’t renamed any of the layers, my apologies)
