Usability and Re designing

GENTIL-KOENIG Joelline
6 min readApr 5, 2021

Joëlline GENTIL KOENIG _Challenge 3 for Ironhack !

Dear Folks,

My purpose here, is to understand how some users will flow in front of a travel app : to identify if there are friction areas and then propose an improvement with a prototype.

My persona for this challenge, is the fantastic Dunphy family building her next trip… Forget the Covid, next year family vacation is going to be BIG !! They want to take their children to know all the world’s wonders, but they need to start with one. After a family vote, it will be the Taj Mahal in India 😎 . Because children have different needs and cannot keep up with only doing tourism, family is looking for a good place to stay and relax. They assume this is going to be quite an expense but they’re looking for opportunities if there would be any.

First step, I did researches to identify travel possibilities and things to know about this destination.

Taj Mahal is in Agra at 114 miles from New Delhi (Capital of India). Below few informations to get on board with our trip :

✈ Plane: From New Delhi to Agra (Kingfisher Airlines or Air India Regional)

🚆 Train or Taj Express from New Delhi 2 hours

🚕Taxi and 🚙 Car : 5 hours from New Delhi to Agra but be careful as Indian have their own driving culture 😉

💉 Vaccination. All tourists visiting India need to get vaccinated for hepatitis A, tetanus and typhoid. In addition, you will need to take malaria tablets to prevent getting infected on your holiday. Depending on what you are planning to do during your holiday, you may need to consider additional vaccinations

💸 Money : Rupee ( 1€ = 86₹)

🛂 Visa : e-visa makes things easier and cheaper. Online you get it for 75€ for a tourist visa.

🕰 Taj Mahal is open for sightseeing from sunrise to sunset (6 AM to 6.30 PM). The monument is open for the public every day except Fridays. On Friday, it is only accessible to Muslims for afternoon prayers.

All right, now we know about more about the destination, we need to do a little benchmark, trying to choose the correct app to help them to organise the Dunphys’ trip ! For this, using heuristic principles is a perfect start. I have compared 3 travel app : Trip Advisor, Hopper & Kayak.

Looking consciously I quickly eliminate Hopper. Heuristic principles are not completely filled in : on the landing page of the app, you have a mix of 2 languages (French and English) and the icon profile at the top left brings to the page settings : both of these 2 ‘mistakes’ are confusing while using. So I have turned my attention partly on Trip Advisor and Kayak.

To be honest, I never used any of these 2 app and looking at them, looking again about heuristic and Dunphy family, there was no specific ‘winner’… So as I have to choose, finally I have chosen Tripadvisor, because one feature on the landing page is Activities. For the Dunphy family, I thought it was quite interesting to have this proposition…

We know the audience targeted, we’ve chosen the app, now it is time to give a context and define tasks, users of the app will have to deal with. Namely organising a familial trip to the Taj Mahal with Trip Advisor App !

A ten days journey, starting with a direct flight from Paris CDG to New Delhi. Departure after Christmas 2021, flexible day, the idea is to be in Agra (Taj Mahal town) for New Years Eve. A cool budget is dedicated, 8000 euros included flight and nights in a nice luxurious hotel. To move around they will rent a car or book a taxi. To get from Delhi to Agra, train seems to be a good choice. And last but not least, before departure they will select and keep one activity to do in Agra during the trip.

To evaluate the app, I need a testing phase. For this I have selected 3 users close to my persona : Christelle, Aurélie and Philippe, all around 40 : certified public accountant, midwife and business manager in wood. All in couples with children. They are the perfect people to help me in my mission.

I explained them the context. Describing quickly the task they will have to deal with and gave them my phone to register their navigation in the app.

I really had to explain that it was not a way to judge or evaluate their way to proceed, but a chance for me to improve the process and make their future experience as seamless as possible.

Back again in my office, I have to analyse results and findings :

🔍 1st discovery : none of my users are used to deal with travel app. More often using google when checking for flights and trips.

🔍 2d discovery : as Trip Advisor was well-known, I was convinced the app was ergonomic and easy to use. Wrong, preconception ! I discover that it is not (for my users in any case)

🔍 3rd discovery : not really a discovery but a mindset. It is really important to be clear in the mission statement and let the user ‘flowing’ without giving more indications (sometimes they are looking for when lost) 😅

Looking again at their navigation after a few days, I was able to write insights :

  • None of them scrolled when entering the app. All started to enter the name of the town they were looking for.
  • They all started to look at the hotel, then flights.
  • Christelle and Philippe noticed the button Trip , Philippe enters a few seconds then quits while Christelle tries to create one, but gives up after naming it.
  • Aurélie and Christelle were quickly annoyed and lost in how to proceed. Aurélie after 5 minutes was redirected to booking.com and did not come back to the app. She stayed on booking and did not understand why she couldn’t book a flight. (page is blocked when coming from another app). She did not notice she was no longer on trip advisor..
  • They all took lots of time outside the app (booking.com, plane company and car rental for Philippe)
  • None of them put anything in Favorite neither Trip.

When they finished, I asked them how they found the experience. Feedbacks were not really laudatory, Aurélie and Christelle felt guilty telling me they were sorry but didn’t feel at ease, saying it was tricky and not obvious for them, not clear on the way to proceed. Philippe told me also that it was not obvious, he did not like the design of the app : too much information . He made a parallel with Airbnb and told me he prefers this app.

After looking at videos and talking with them, the friction point I hold back : they closed their mission, without any track of their research or favorite places/flights recorded on the Trip Advisor app. Nothing was register, which is a waste of time when organising a trip 🙊:

  • no need to come back on the app
  • need to start again all the research if (by chance) coming back .
  • no possibility to follow pricing changing/ to compare season travel etc….

Last part of this challenge, the point of view : How to create an intuitive feature, simplifying navigation and recording choices without financial commitment ?

After a few sketches to organise my thoughts, below the prototype. 1st line, proposed amendments and below how it is today (here to see the prototype) :

To conclude my ‘Dunphys’ challenge’ :

  • a well known app like Tripadvisor can be hard to use looking at some audience
  • I have chosen user close to me and kept in mind I was not the user of the app, only evaluating it. It was a will to start (to facilitate empathy)
  • 3 users is not enough to be sure I have a sure understanding of friction points.
  • As the mission is stopping here I really look after my teachers’ feedback to know if my proposition is coherent…Hope so 🙈

In the meantime I will contact Aurélie,Christelle and Philippe to see how they feel about the prototype. Just to know ;)

Thanks for the time you took to read me. Do not hesitate to share your comments !

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GENTIL-KOENIG Joelline

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anais Nin