Ironhack’s Prework: Elsa Veyret_Challenge 3 Usability Evaluation and Site Redesign

7 min readApr 2, 2021

Third challenge from Iron Hack’s prework, is to pretend to be a world traveler and analyse an application and test it in order to see which problems the users can find and how to solve it.

1. THE USER TYPE

The first step of this new mission is to determine who are the users:

Young group — 20–40 y/o
You and your friends have decided to invest and spend some quality time together. You are planning your trip one year in advance to really make it happen and accommodate everybody’s schedules and needs. You’d like to share as much time together and plan for a lot of fun. You’re interested in a mix of culture and leisure. You have all saved for the last year for the trip so, while you’re still price-conscious this is the opportunity to spoil yourselves.

2. ON THE PAPYRUS ROAD

Next, we establish a scenario for the users, from the destination to all the accommodations details. Lucky them, it’s Egypt! Cairo, is the largest city and capital of Egypt. Located near the Nile Delta, you will be into the most famous antique city. Its treasures from Antiquity and Pharaons offer you very wonderful landscapes. You can visit the Giza pyramid complex, the ancient city of Memphis and, lot of mosques, and the Coptic area.

To go there from Paris you can take a direct flight(4h20) to Cairo, and arrive at the Cairo International Airport. It is located 20 kilometers northeast of downtown Cairo, also known as Al Qahira. You can join the center with a bus or a taxi, a uber…

Your dream trip to Cairo is organized from September 18 to September 25 2021.

Before the trip assure that your passport is still valide. It is also recommended to do before the trip, different standard vaccines such as Hepatitis A/B, Typhoid, rabies.
The money is the EGP pound. All the banks in Cairo accept euros. You can also pay with your credit card (VISA, Master Card) but museums sometimes do not accept it.
Don’t forget to take with you a very confortable pair of sneakers ;)
There is no time difference with France in Egypt.

3. BENCHMARKING

SKYSCANNER, TRIP ADVISOR, HOPPER

For the user type “young couple” I chose Trip Advisor because the filters are more specific, and the app looks more familiar and easy to use to the users. Actually the flow on the website looks already seamless. So I think it’s interesting to see, what kind of problems users may face with.

4. TESTING

LOOK AND FEEL:

The users were given 5 seconds to take a look at the home screen of Tripadvisor mobile website.

Most of them said that they recognised the Tripadvisor website. They know that they can find some nice places, restaurants, hotels and mostly travelers opinions. One of them talked about a “community where you can rate some activities and share it with the others”. “In Japan, I bought some tickets on TripAdvisor to go to a theme park.”

To one user TripAdvisor “isn’t a place where to reserve but somewhere to get informed”.

Some of them said there are too many informations in the same page, so it’s a bit confusing.

USERS TASKS:

USERS The budget is about 150–200€ by night and you stay in this hostel from 18 to September 25, 2021. Keep in mind that you want to visit some museums, walk around pyramids and visit the antique center. You will take the taxi and the metro to move in Cairo.

Book a flight Paris — Cairo
Book an hotel
Book some activities

I asked 7 young couples to record their screen during the 3 missions to get the more informations possible.

5. INSIGHT

Here I’m going to find, thanks to the results of the tests, what could be redesign in a future iteration of the mobile website.

Different friction areas:

GENERAL: Most of the users didn’t know that to book a flight or an hotel, you are redirected to a partner commercial website. It created some disappointment at first, and then to go through the reservation, it was a very long process. Negative emotions came after discover the redirection. They need a lot of clicks to get to the flight !

So, to remedy this frustration, I thought about adding a more specific written information before the page with all the flights or hotels, so that they will be alterted about the process. Writting change: “Discover many hostels on our partners websites”. And also, next to the button “View deals” add a logo of the partner website to clarify to the user that he won’t pay on TripAdvisor directly.

2. ACTIVITIES: FILTERS, KM LIST: When the users want to reserve an hotel near many activities (visit the center, and principal monuments) in the filters, they are frustrated because the list is a radio buttons list.

It could be interesting to allow the users to select one or more options instead of the actual radio buttons. Even if activities are not necessary near to each other, the user could see it by himself and make his choice in consequence. Thanks to that, he won’t have to create another research just after to see which hotels are near an other touristic point. Then, he just have to choose which one prioritise.

3. ACTIVITIES — RESERVATION BUTTON: To reserve an activity on Tripadvisor, the user has to scroll the page, to find the button “RESERVATION” on the passing header. 2 of them didn’t find it easily, they had to scroll again to discover it.

It might be more simple to put the button on the actual page, or to fix this header on the screen, so it could be actually visible during all the scrolling.

4. HOTELS/FLIGHTS — PRICE FILTER: The next negative point I realized during the interviews is about the price range slider in the hotel and flight reservation. You can choose your budget to the nearest euro, but it makes the price range slider too tightened to use with your fingers on the screen. Besides, it’s much too close to the screen edges, it makes it difficult to manipulate, the screen moves in the same time.

Here, I would like to first: reduce the size of the range slider, and then to offer prices in increments of 10 euros to gain a bit of space.

OTHER NEGATIVE POINTS:

GENERAL CONFUSION: Almost all of the users I asked to use Tripadvisor said that they were confused because there are a lot of informations at a time on the screen and a lot of small characters. Some of them just gave up. They felt like the mobile website wasn’t fluid enough.
ACTIVITIES: For a trip in 6 months, you can’t reserve activities, it’s available only until 2 months after.
POP UP WINDOW: Also when they arrive on the website, the users are annoyed by the window that pop up, to register your email in case of you need alerts for your next trip.

POSITIVE POINTS:

COMMUNITY WEBSITE: One of the users said that she likes to look at the consumers opinions to find a good restaurant when she goes in holidays. Usually she uses Tripadvisor only for this kind of research, and also to book some hotels with a free annulation in advance, without paying. For her, Tripadvisor is a website not to buy but to compare and discover good places and restaurants that people tested before. It’s more a community website where to find good tips.

6. REDESIGN WIREFRAMES

I decided to redesign, the 4 main points mentioned above, in low and mid fidelity.

GENERAL: Writting change: “Discover many hostels on our partners websites”. Next to the button “View deals” : logo of the partner website.

2. ACTIVITIES: FILTERS, KM LIST: Check boxes list

3. ACTIVITIES — RESERVATION BUTTON:

4. HOTELS/FLIGHTS — PRICE FILTER:

MID-FIDELITY WIREFRAMES ON FIGMA

I really liked to analyse how the users are processing through the website, and to note what kind of things could be changed. It was a long work to associate and determine where to start wireframing. This challenge made me also me to focus on the user’s needs and expectations, and staying as much neutral as possible. I would like to work more on this point to get better interviews and to be able to redesign with the most informations. I also understood how it’s important to be organized in all the process to not forget any part of the exercise.