Usability Evaluation and Redesign of Skyscanner mobile app
Ironhack Bootcamp Prework — Challenge 3: Usability Evaluation and Site Redesign
For this usability challenge the proposed methodology consists of putting us in the shoes of a traveler who uses a mobile app to book his travel in order to evaluate its usability and from that to purpose a redesign that replies to the identified pain points.
Defining the scenario based on the user type
The persona I selected based on a received list of several user types was the Worldtrotter/Backpacker — 18–38 y/o who will be travelling in 6 months so it has some budget constraints and is looking for experiences that allows him to meet people.
The user i had interviewed that matches the presented persona is a freelancer product manager who considers itself a digital nomad once he adopted a slow type of travelling to work anywhere around the world while engaging with the local people and its culture. He wants to live the next months of the current year in Bansko (Bulgaria) where there is a coworking community of people who also works online. Living surrounded by people who shares the same style of life it will be a great way of networking. Besides that this city is also known for having a long ski season that is why he is wants to spend the winter there to have the experience of living in a cold country although he will have to buy winter clothes for the first time. Another attractive advantage is the low cost of living once he receives in euros he will save some money by paying in Lev, the local currency (1 BGN = 0,51 EUR).
To get to Bansko he will need to take a flight to the Sofia airport which is two hours away from there. Once there he will take public transports to Bansko. His main concerns are the flight ticket and PCR test prices. Specially the last one can be very expensive and due to the COVID travel policies it will mandatory doing it to be able to enter in Bulgaria. He has a limited bugdet of 300€ for one way travel. Fortunately having a EU passport it will not be needed a visa only to register himself with the local authorities for stays longer than 90 days. But he still has to book a hostel within this budget for the first week there while he searches for an apartment to rent.
Benchmarking
Taking into account the previous requirements to book an one way travel that includes the flight ticket and one week hostel reservation I evaluated the usability of three booking travel mobile apps to find the one that best suits his needs. The evalution was based on Nielsen’s usability heuristics approach.
After the usability evaluation both Skyscanner and Trip Advisor are the ones that get the best results among the three. However the Skyscanner has a feature that replies directly to the need of the user which is combining in one search the flight and hostel. By creating a travel in the app he can do this and save the reservations together which also facilitates the accessibility. In terms of value proposition this app is very intuitive which makes it easier and quicker to use.
Testing
After selecting Skyscanner as the best mobile app to search for the user’s travel it is time to perfom some usability tests. To do that I did interviews to users that fit the selected user type.
The first test was to the look and feel of the mobile app. They had 5 seconds to take a look at the home screen and after that they had covered it while replying to the questions:
- “What did you see?”;
- “What can this tool do for you?” ;
- “Where would you search for a flight?”.
The answers to the first question were that the app has a travel map with covid informations, a menu with four options and search bar at the footer. To the second question I got replies as “selecting destination to travel during the pandemic”, “booking flights and hotels” and “searching for flight routes”. To the last question all of them replied they could search on the footer menu bar.
For the second and last test, the interviewees had to execute two tasks of simulating a booking of an one way flight to Sofia (Bulgaria) and an one week hostel in Bansko (Bulgaria) under the following conditions:
- departure from Lisbon (Portugal);
- a limited budget of 150€;
- no timetable or date restrictions.
Insights
During the test sessions, everyone easily completed the task of simulating a Lisbon-Sofia flight reservation. But all of them had problems to do the same for the one week hostel reservation in Bansko. A few had applied a price filter for the lowest prices but could not find a hostel. The others found a type of accomodation but hostel was not among the available options. In the end none of them could move further to the reservations options for a hostel in Bansko because there were no results for hostels. Probably it was related to the chosen dates being so close to the test session day. But to come to this conclusion all of them took almost the entire time of the test session.
By seeing the test sessions i realized that the filters are only possible to apply after the search results the users did not found the hostel option because there were no results for that option. This situation make them doubt their search was correct because once in the filter section the users expected to see all of the possible categories to be applied. As all left the sessions feeling unpleasant with this experience I decided to redesign the search feature to prevent future situations like this lead the users to drop the search and even lead to not using again the mobile app.
Resdesing wireframes for the search feature
The first screen is a representation of the Skyscanners actual screen for hotels search with the adding of the fourth button to filter the type of accommodation prior to getting the search results. After selecting this button the second screen will slide to up and show all of the possible categories for the accommodation type filter. By selecting one or more categories it will move to the third and last screen of the search results.
