Challenge 3: Usability Evaluation and Site Redesign
In the third challenge of IronHack’s Pre-Work i was given the opportunity to make some “updates” to a travel app. My travel application of choice was Skyscanner. It’s an easy to use app that give users filtered deals from different airlines, hotels, and car rentals to help them on their trips.
My role was to interview up to 5 people for this redesign. The purpose of interviewing multiple people is to receive feedback on anything that may need changing. Along with receiving feedback, this interview acts as a usability evaluation for individuals that may want to travel in the future.
User Type
Young couple: ages 20–40 y/o
You and your partner decide to go to a special place next summer. You realize you have both saved enough for the tickets and are planning to save as much as possible for the next 6 months to do this trip. You want to be efficient and have everything you need organized to enjoy at 100% while there. Even if you’re young, you want to have special moments to celebrate being together.
Research
The destination chosen for this scenario is Madrid, Spain. Once the couples reach Madrid they hope to visit the Prado Museum. This is achievable by arriving at Madrid-Barajas Airport since it is the closest airport to the museum. In Spain they use Euros so the couples would have to change their money beforehand. The budget they have is $3,500 which is equivalent to 2955.48 Euros. All couples have their visas and get vaccinated just in time to travel. Since they plan on taking this vacation in the summer they have packed clothing suited to wear in the heat. In the summer Spain gets very hot so it’s important that they take some shorts and tank tops with them. To have a comfortable trip without any rush the couples will stay 5 days to enjoy Madrid as they please.
Interviews
For this challenge I interviewed 5 different people that are all in relationships. Of course I chose individuals with partners because they fit the criteria for the type of user that i was looking for. Luckily everyone I interviewed loves to travel and were very excited to test out Skyscanner. I decided to use the 5 second test and showed them 3 different screens. I asked them questions about how they the app made them feel and what they liked/didn’t like. After the 5 second test i let the users play around on the app to really grasp what bugged them and what didn’t.
What i found out were three things. The colors at the beginning of the app were a bit confusing. The icons for planes, hotels, and cars are the same color which bothered some of my participants. One individual found that it was odd that the search section only included planes and hotels but not car rental searches unlike the first page. The last thing i got from this was that the search results weren’t enough for some people.
Redesign Result
After i concluded my interviews i sought out to tweak a few things where my participants had the most trouble.
This is the first page I redesigned. I took into consideration how my participants felt about the icons being the same color and changed them a bit to provide a clear distinction between the three. The arrow in the middle is there to directly point out the changes from the real app (on the left) and my version (on the right).
This is the second page i decided to work with. Here I added in the car row for people that may want to specifically search car rentals. I wanted to keep the colors and everything else the same here as theres no issue with the rest of the page. To the right I added an arrow to show people who may not see the difference the minor tweak i made.
For my final page I added a couple more rows to the results. When I was interviewing people felt like they weren’t given enough options so to help them out I made more sections to give them more options.
In the pictures above i’ve provided side by side comparison with the real Skyscanner app and my redesign. I decided to do a comparison to show the difference in the app after I made my changes.
Conclusions
This challenge was very helpful and educational because it showed me that sometimes designs might only need minor changes to help its overall performance. Besides that this lesson also taught me that putting the user first is the most important thing to do. I really liked this challenge and i’m grateful to have had the opportunity to learn more.
