Art
Design
Creativity
Professional Diploma in UX Design
Final project for the Professional Diploma in UX Design, of the UX Design Institute, August 2021.
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Hospitality is an industry that can really benefit from UX. Booking a hotel room online should be a simple process but, sometimes, it can feel complex.
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The aim of my project was to uncover how users really feel about the existing room booking process across the industry and design a solution that has the potential to solve their problems.
Case of Study
New hotel want to create an online booking experience.
Simple
Accessible
Understanding of their target users.
The tools
Survey Monkey
Figma
Miro
Task
Design a new website for desktop.
Design a new booking process
Goal (Academic)
Design and build a clickable prototype that can be tested with users, along with a detailed set of wireframes.
Duration
6 Months
My Role
UX Researcher / UX Designer
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The Process
Bring it to life
Design Specifications
The Challenge
Identify and define the problems in the online reservation process for hotel rooms in a concrete way, through the tools and research methods applied in the course, and use this data to create a new process and design.
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I looked at how other hotels, top of the industry, solve this problem (benchmark), I performed usability tests, applied Online surveys, and master the note-taking techniques for this research case.
I used that information to focus my research and ultimately improve the quality of my designs.
Goal #1: Design and build a clickable prototype that can be tested with users, along with a detailed set of wireframes.
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Goal #2: Create a design that has the intention of resolve the issues around the pain points identified in the research and analysis.
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Project Goals
Research
Learning about our customers
BENCHMARK ANALYSIS
5 Top leaders of the industry, Benchmark analysis:
ONLINE SURVEY
15 Users respond to an online survey
USABILITY TEST
3 Usability test / Note-taking
BENCHMARK ANALYSIS
What are the best practices of the industry?
As a starting point, I reviewed Hotels-related websites to see what they’re doing well that I can emulate when it comes to designing my own room booking process. Most of the websites were Hotels, but I was also interested to see if I can learn anything from other types of booking platforms, such as Booking.com.
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During my benchmark research, I came to realise that for a relatively simple task as finding and booking a room, many different solutions exist across Hotels websites. This made me wonder how users are interacting with the different booking experiences and I kicked off my user research to understand their needs and pain points better.
ONLINE SURVEY
Why do people visit a Hotel website and what do they do?
To learn more about the goals of people that use hotels websites and apps, I created an online survey. Ideally, I would have placed this survey on a Hotels website to intercept people as they’re using the software. In this case, I sent the survey to friends and colleagues instead (who have used an Hotel website within the past 6 months).
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Key findings:
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The primary user goal is to research book a room, followed by check rates and the hotel information.
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Value for money is the most important factor when booking a room
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Users want to find clear information about the hotel and the conditions.
INTERVIEWS & USABILITY TESTS
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Confusion, distrust and mistakes -
the common themes of booking a room
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To dive deeper into understanding hotels customers’ mental models and behaviours, I conducted in-depth user interviews, followed by comparative usability testing sessions. During the sessions, users completed the same room booking tasks on two different Hotel websites.
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It was surprising to see that none of the participants had a straightforward booking experience. Even people who are frequent travelers struggled with some of the steps along the way. Although their pain points and frustrations were different, they were all related to selecting the right type of room and fare type and booking conditions.
Data from the different research sources
