UX CASE STUDY

ODESSA HOTEL

This case study is a project at UX Design Institue,
its main focus is the room booking experience.

Overview
 

With Booking.com, many hotels are experiencing a decline in direct bookings. Their booking processes can lack user user-friendlyness, leading customers to third party aggregators or competitors. Booking.com's popularity stems from its intuitive interface and comprehensive information, which many hotel websites lack. Despite its convenience, Booking.com charges comissions for each booking, incentivising hotels to increase direct bookings.

The challenge then becomes:

How can hotels deter users from booking through Booking.com and encourage them to complete bookings on their own platforms?

As this is a fictional project, the images displayed are from existing hotels/venues like The Hoxton, The Audo, PURO, Casa Cook, Opasły Tom and Santa Monica Proper

To figure that out I started some research by doing competitive benchmarking, to see what the market offered at that moment and what I should aim to improve upon.

Though I was comparing renowned hotels, I still noticed confusing structure, unclear language, missing information, which was reinforced again later by conducting usability tests.

Through in-depth interviews and online-surveys, I learnt that users actually want to book through the hotel website, because in case of cancellation, it’s easier to contact the hotel. Another reason is to support smaller businesses. Despite the best intentions, users often will end up booking through sites like Booking.com, because it’s “easier”, or it was frustrating trying to use the hotel’s own website.

With all the information I gathered in the discovery phase, I made a customer journey map. I was able to analyse where problems occur, and started to think about what needed to be done to prevent this from happening.

Users get frustrated when websites are unstructured, which causes them not to find what they are looking for.
Especially when things are unclear, like they don’t understand the differences between rooms, or things they tried to do aren’t working. They get frustrated, because they spend more time on the hotel's website, than actually planned.

By ideating user flows in a flow chart and creating a site map, I started to build the information architecture. During this phase I got a better vision of what path the user has to follow in order to proceed to the next step and complete the task.

Sketching different screens on paper, moving buttons about, and testing various layouts helped me to find the best solution. With these wireframes I was able to turn the ideas into a clickable prototype.

I tested the prototype with users, and realised what was problematic in my design. My key findings where that users scroll faster, than their mind can perceive, and that they don't read. So I had to go back and make edits on typography and layout. After making the adjustments, I tested the prototype again, this time the users were able to book a room smoothly without disruptions.

Then I annotated the designs, as handover for development.

What I've learnt

I’ve learnt about a lot of things, but the most beneficial was usability testing. To see how users engage with your product is so extremely insightful, as every user has different needs and motivations.

Some of my assumptions were wrong, because users perceive the product from their unique point of view, which is sometimes easy to forget. 

 "People don't read, they scan." was a big takeaway, after I saw users failing to find information, although they were actually there. Keeping that in mind, I went back and forth: I edited–added and deleted, improved the design throughout the process. I understand now that UX design is an iterative process, unlike architecture.

All in all my takeaway is that it’s very important to conduct usability tests, but it’s equally as important to collaborate: Discussions and feedback on design are crucial, in order to create a successful product.