Contributors

Josel Canlas - UI/UX Designer & Researcher

Eunseol Park - UI/UX Designer & Researcher

Annie Tang - UI/UX Designer & Researcher

Nicholas Greco - UI/UX Designer & Researcher

Allyana Alviar - UI/UX Designer & Researcher

Goal

Find an existing website that needs UI/UX improvements. Conduct user research and tests to find qualitative and quantitative data for UI/UX issues on the site. With the test results, redesign the website to solve these problems and attract users to visit Prague.

Narrative

Prague Experience is a website that provides tourist activities, accommodations, and reviews for tourists visiting Prague. This website has a large amount of information, but not a great layout to support it. The overload of information can make it difficult to find certain pages. As a Lean UX team, it was our job to determine all the problems and redesign the Prague Experience website. To do this, we had to create tasks for testing our business problems, run user tests, and design the new website.

Phase 1: Selecting Testers

First, we found users to test the existing site. We wanted users who enjoy travelling internationally, so we made screener questions to select our ideal users. We asked people we knew to take the screener through Google Forms. Our goal was to have 5 users who matched our target audience and available to test. According to UX expert Jacob Nielsen’s study, 5 users are the most optimal for finding majority of issues. This is because the more users you add, the more duplicate issues can be found. We eventually found the 5 ideal users.

Phase 2: Identifying Problems

While we found users, we identified business problems, created assumptions, and hypothesized what could happen with improvements. In terms of UI/UX, business problems explain how aspects of a website can hinder the success of a business. The business problems we found with the website were:

• The large amount of information with no hierarchy overloads the user with information, causing them trouble when finding relevant information.
• No signifiers or affordances makes navigation links unfriendly to users, which will increase bounce rate
• Not optimized for mobile and tablet devices, which will lose many potential users

We had 4 assumptions for why users would use this website:

• Find local activities/food
• Looking to travel and are interested in what Prague has to offer
• Looking for places to stay
• To read reviews

Hypotheses are what we think would happen if we improved on the business problems. What we hypothesized was:

1. We believe user engagement will be increased by 20% if new users are provided an easy and clear to use navigation.
2. We believe bounce rate will decrease by 70% if the hierarchy of information is reassessed and organized
3. Integrating social media features and user-generated content, such as reviews and travel photos, will increase the credibility of the website and encourage more visitors to use it as a trusted resource.

Phase 3: User Tests

Next, we created 3 tasks to test our business problems and hypotheses. We used moderated tests to guide the testers, but not influence their actions. We had 1 moderator and 2 observers per task. The moderator did all the interactions with the user, while observers were like flies on a wall, not interacting or distracting. Observers took quick observations using rainbow sheets.

Task #1: Book a reservation at restaurant of choice

Testers were to:

1. Navigate to the restaurants page
2. Find the restaurant
3. Click the book button
4. Fill in the information and book (make the tester stop before sending info)

As expected, many users were overwhelmed at this part because of the overload of information. This caused the users to take more time to find the restaurants page. One user even sighed trying to navigate through this task.

Task #2: Read a review and find the reviewed place

Testers were to:

1. Find the "Trip Reviews" button.
2. Select a review
3. Find the place where the selected review was about

Users had minimal difficulty finding the reviews page, but were overwhelmed by how the comments were laid out. One user complained about there being no search button for the comments. Then came the most difficult part of the task, finding the reviewed place. Users had extreme difficulty finding the corresponding place since there was no way to filter or search. Many scrolled up and down many times to find it. One user failed to find it.

Task #3: Book an accommodation for 4 nights

Users were to:

1. Find Prague package page
2. Find a 4-night package
3. Book

Some users were able to find the page easily, while others were not. Once on the page, users were able to find the packages after scrolling down. Some users failed to book a 4-night package and booked a different type instead.

At the end of each test, we gave users a System Usability Scale (SUS) test. The average score between our 5 testers was 23/100, which is unacceptable on the SUS.

Phase 4: Redesign

Using the results from the tests, we designed a new version of the Prague Experience website. I was in charge of redesigning the restaurants page, but I contributed ideas in all of the designs. To solve the overload of information, we created categories containing the activities. The original website had 12 sections, we made it into 6! Along with this, we added a header nav for further navigation improvements. As for finding page information, we created filters and a search bar to let users decide what they are looking for.