HotelTonight Guerilla Usability Testing

I ran a guerrilla usability test for HotelTonight — mobile app for last moment hotel deals available for Android and iOS — to uncover any pain points or opportunity gaps.

HotelTonight is a really fun to use and well made mobile application with cool interactions, but usability testing revealed that users have a couple of issues with the app features.

This small usability testing was run among 3 users.

Objectives

Identify the pain points users have while using the mobile app.

Tasks

Task 1. Download the app and sign in

Task 2. Share your thoughts on what your first impressions are. Do you understand what HotelTonight is about?

Task 3. Book a hotel in San Francisco for tonight. I also presented users with a scenario that they are looking for a comfortable and clean 3–4 star hotel near Union Square for a reasonable price.

Usability Testing

While users were following the tasks I was observing and taking notes. Usability testing revealed the following gaps:

・None of the users realized that HotelTonight is focused on the last minute booking.

“What do you think HotelTonight is about?”

“It is a hotel booking app, like Expedia or Hotels.com”

・I did receive positive feedback about smooth interactions, overall visual design and great photos. However, one of the users commented on the fact that because there is no white space used between photos on the main screen UI looks kind of busy (pic 1).

・I noticed that User #3 used a different gesture when she wanted to open the map on the hotel details page. Instead of tapping on the map she tried to zoom in with two fingers (pic 2).

“I noticed you are trying to zoom in on the map image. What did you expect to happen”.

“Oh yeah, I expected the map to become just a little bit bigger but the rest of the page will stay the same, like in a preview. I did not want to go to the next page just to see the map.”

I thought that was an interesting observation.

・Task #3 uncovered that users were confused about HotelTonight categories as well as Geo Rate.

“I see they are not using star system, but these categories instead: basic, solid, luxury etc. I don’t know what neither hip or high roller means here.”

In all cases users expected to see an explanation for it and tried tapping on the word. Instead of an explanation that click is sending them to the hotel information page, where unfortunately the category is still not explained.

“Geo Rate? I don’t know what it means”.

Same story as with categories, tapping did not lead to an answer.

None of the users paid attention that the profile page had FAQs and About page which have not been viewed at all.

In addition, users are used to using filter option:

“I wish they had a filter option here. So I could filter their search to a specific category or price”

Suggestions

Adding some sort of on boarding screen introducing HotelTonight as a mobile app with the best price for the last minute bookings.

Adding a hot spot with description for categories (basic, solid, lux, hip etc). By clicking on the word user should be able to see description on what this category means exactly (pic3).

Adding a hot spot with description for Geo Rate same with categories or possibly change the term for something that is more recognizable, something like “Best Price” or “Best Deal”. Something that will clearly say that it is the best rate possible.