Usability and Mid-fi Wireframing
For this challenge, we’re evaluating the usability of an app dedicated to travel-planning. I chose to work with Skyscanner as I had never used it previously and it resonated with me aesthetics-wise.
[Challenge 3]
Travel light — or not: your call, as it should be
Travel-planning can be a tough task, especially when one is planning parts of a trip that involves others. It’s important to map out just so many simple things at first — where’s the nearest airport, the most convenient destinations from there, are there hospitals in the area, what are the facilities in the housing of our choosing, what will the weather be like on a given period of time, so on and so forth; and it’s very easy to realise how all of these small things play an impactful role in the overall experience of travelling.
Aside from those, a big question that hovers over even the faintest of group-travel plans: what are we doing once we get there? What are the spots we simply cannot miss? What is unique to that specific city/country that we should experience? How is the cuisine there? What options do we have for indoors activities in case the weather doesn’t treat us well? This type of information makes up the juiciest bits of the trip, and as such deserves special attention in an app that is dedicated to travel planning, one would safely assume. I would, anyhow.
Off to conducting interviews.
Gotta love listening to my beloved users!
As for the interviews I conducted, the users — all in their 20s, comfy travelers, unfamiliar with Skyscanner — were asked specifically to plan this trip:
- 3 people travelling together on a Friday night in August 2020;
- One of them would be stuck at work til 7 pm, so the flight should be considerably later than that to avoid setbacks;
- They had to use the app to find interesting tourist spots/activities worth doing;
- They had to save the trip details for checking back later once they got the approval of the other two travelers to proceed;
- And finally, they would at some point notice that the app’s currency was in Burundian Franc (FBu), so they had to change it back to Brazilian Real in order to have a better notion of the prices for budgeting.
During this process, the interviewees bumped into some dead-ends and sometimes were left with no option but to start all over again their task. Here’s a short list of such moments:
- In trying to include a child younger than 12, an interviewee found themselves unable to locate tickets with the addition of the infant passenger. No explanation was given by the app as to why that had happened.
- An interviewee had some really interesting destinations in mind, but couldn’t find tickets for those at all, so they had to change their destination at least three times; again, no explaining why the tickets weren’t available.
- One of them complained that the app had way too many pop-up boxes providing information they hadn’t requested nor needed, which cluttered the screen and made the scrolling confusing;
- More than one interviewee, once they realised they needed to change the currency in the app, said they were unsure if they would lose the info they had already inputted, so they’d rather continue the search without accurate prices;
- Some of them reported that the initial search screen was confusing, in that they weren’t sure if the magnifying glass floating to the side was just a simple icon or a button that had to be activated (it was a button);
- An interviewee complained that they couldn’t purchase the tickets on Skyscanner, for the app redirected the user to the company’s own website in order to finish the purchase.
Sketching up solutions
The thing that personally set me off the most was the fact that one had to go all the way back to the user settings page in order to swap the currency. In my point of view, currency is so crucial (especially when it comes down to international fares) that the user should be able to tweak it fast and easily. So my redesign took into account this particular pain, and my solution would be an added feature on the “Sort & Filter” slide-menu, which can be accessed once the trip details have been inserted:
Once the menu is opened, the user needs to scroll it all the way down to find all the types of filters available. My new feature would fit below the “Airlines & Airports” section, as displayed in the wireframing below:
Ending thoughts
I believe the greatest take-away from this experience was learning that the user needs to know why their action wasn’t processed the expected way. Being left in the dark is very upsetting, and maybe extra consideration can be given to the way unhappy paths end — “Search didn’t return any results” just won’t cut it.
