App Critique: Tripadvisor’s Homepage & Trip Function
Tripadvisor, an online travel company, has the mission to inspire and enable people to confidently explore, experience, and share our world. In this article, we look into the user experiences of Tripadvisor app on Android and iOS, focusing on exploration activities on the home page and the trip function.
Here are our key questions: Do their user experiences match Tripadvisor’s vision? How to create better experiences for future travellers?
Homepage
Search flow
The search experience on the homepage could be more concise and understandable.
There are 3 places to search for hotels and restaurants: the top search box, “where to” search box, and “continue your search” card.
The intended operation flow of exploring detailed information in a location is: putting the location first in the “where to” box, then clicking on the icons beneath about places and restaurants to visit in this location. If users click on the icons without filling in the “where to” box, the same pop-up page will show each time for users to fill in the destination. This could lead to confusion because users don’t know why clicking on a hotel icon would lead to a search page. To improve, we could use defaults. For example, setting the current location as default on the “where to” instead of a separate option under it and indicating users to change the default if they prefer another destination. In this way, users who want to explore nearby could explore nearby directly. It also creates direct use cues for users who want to search for other places.
What’s more, the “continue your search” seems to be an unnecessary feature here. We understand the clear intention behind this feature: to help users retrieve research results with a shortcut. However, users get results easily from the search history without this feature, to say nothing of so much space it has taken.
Exploration
Searching one place from the selection box, the homepage would show specific information about the destination. On the top, they use a photo of that place as a banner, giving users obvious and interesting feedback for searching behavior. Another Interesting feature here is the small camera icon on the left bottom of the banner. Users could view all the nice photos taken by other travelers. But it’s a pity for many photos, there is no access to their location information. For the others with an account profile, there is also little chance to find the original post, unless the user is patient enough to go through all the posts for that picture. With a way to link the location directly with the photo, this could be a convenient tool for users to explore places to visit with ease and interest.
Recommendations
When users scroll down to the bottom, this page provides users with diverse travel recommendations, like “recently viewed destination”, “explore nearby place”, “recommended for you”, “from the community”. One nice design detail here is users could go back to the top by clicking the fixed icons. This speeds up the interactions and enables a fluent flow from random exploring activities to booking services, which is essential to commercial benefits.
However, due to the unclear information hierarchy, users could still get lost when viewing recommended content. There is no clear visual segmentation between different sections. So it’s unintuitive and users need some time to identify which information is important to them. Also, for each card, they use only one font style with the same weight for many places. So we found although the graphic style is coherent and clear, they fail to highlight the important information and indicate hierarchy.
Apart from the flat visual structure, “from the community” contains both users’ posts and commercial articles. Information from both these two ways are beneficial, but we think it’s better to divide them into two small tabs under the page, or creating a new tab “community” in the navigation bar. This could provide users with more flexibility in finding their desired information.
Trip Section
Being put as one independent part on the bottom navigation bar, we can see that “Trips” is considered as an important function of Tripadvisor. Aligned with the app’s mission to be a platform for people to share the world, “Trips” does a good job of sharing. For example, users could create a new trip and invite friends to plan a trip together or make the trip public so that everyone else is able to have a look at it when they need a reference before traveling. Besides sharing, planning a trip is the core function of this page since people’s main operations here are adding the activities to different trips and organizing them based on the dates. However, there are many improvements that need to be done to make the “Trips” page an excellent assistant for travelers.
Trips List
Travelers would have a view of all the trips they created on this page before clicking on a specific trip. Two contexts are possible here: they tend to see the trip before starting off or they want to have a look at one trip they went on before. However, for each trip, the only information on this page is the name created by the user, a picture, public or private, and how many items, omitting the most important 2 things: the places and time of the trips. In this situation, we suppose some users would spend extra time to find the right trip since they need to click into different trips several times.
Trip Page
Presenting
Users could have an overview of the whole trip on this page, including dates and activities. However, with big images of each activity, users need to scroll down for a long time to see all contents of the trip, which does not help a lot to generate a clearer picture of the trip in the user’s head. Also, the dates are not outstanding on the page, users can easily get lost when they are browsing.
Arranging
For the content of the page, activities and cities are shown together without any distinction, which is not intuitive, and it actually makes more sense to include the activities in cities since cities are the locations for multiple activities to be held. In addition, as an important function here, the “organize” button is only on the top, users should scroll up for a while to organize this trip. It would be better to always show the button on the page, even with the other 3 buttons: “Edit Trip”, “Edit dates” and “Invite” when users scrolling.
Map
There is a map on the top of the page showing the places in the trip. However, the most useful function for a map during a trip is to show how far two places are away from each other, which is missing from this page. It would be more meaningful to let people know how they can go from one place to another with the map.
Floating Action Button
Floating Action Button is one important element apps often use to put major functions on. There is a floating action button on Tripadvisor, which is used for users to create trips, write reviews and post photos on the home page. To keep the consistency, it is also keeped on the trips page. However, the functions of the button here seem to be unnecessary. Firstly, people could choose to add links or notes in the trip through the button, but the function already exists on each activity or city. What’s more, users would get confused when adding notes or link through the extra button because they do not know where the notes and links will be, and as a matter of fact, the new links and notes would be put on the top or bottom of the page, which might not be expected before. Besides, although the third function of the button is searching to add items to the trip, which seems more useful, users actually can not get to the detailed page of what they searched but directly add the items which is quite disappointing for some users.
Organize
Users could drag and drop the items on the “Organize”. But the experience may be much better if this operation can be incorporated into the trip page in a good way. Also, with all the grey and black fonts showing the information, there is no apparent distinction between the dates and the items, which might lead to users’ tiredness when browsing.
Except planning trips, some other functions in the “Trips” part could also be improved. The “My saves” is a good function where people can put the places they want to go in the future. But it would be better if users can sort these saves. “Recently Viewed” provides an opportunity to look back for users, but it seems not that intuitive to put this function in the “Trips” page.
To sum up, there is a great potential for “Trips” being a wonderful tool for travelers if it could be improved nicely.
Conclusion
Based on the above review, we see Tripadvisor’s mission through many amazing functions like various recommendations for confident explorations and sharing and planning trips with friends. Despite the success of these nice features, there still exists areas for continued enhancement. To leave users a better first impression on the homepage, we suggest to pay more attention on improving the search efficiency, clarifying the information hierarchy on the recommended content. Also, it’s a great opportunity to optimize the “Trip” function and make it an efficient assistant for travelers.
