Brief
I completed this project for my Professional Diploma in UX (User Experience) Design with the UX Design Institute. The brief was to research airline websites or apps, then develop a new user interface that tackled the problems faced by users. As the project is long I’ve broken this case study into five sections. This section focuses on the User Research phase.
“I find them all equally awful”
Iain Shaw, Test Participant, talking about airline websites
Project
Usability tests
My first task was to conduct usability tests with people who had previously booked flights online. I examined several airline websites and whittled it down to two sites that had both good and bad elements; EasyJet and British Airways. The usability tests consisted of a short interview, followed by the users pretending to book a flight on EasyJet, then on British Airways. In order to prepare for the tests, I created the following:
- Usability Test Script for my reference
- Recruitment Screener
- Consent form for sharing clips on my portfolio
- Participant guidelines
- Observer guidelines for Chantal Dipnarine who took notes.
I installed Camtasia to record the screen, set up my smartphone and tablet to video the room and my webcam to record my users’ faces as they ran through the tasks. I then ran two practice sessions to ensure the technology was all working and I hadn’t missed anything.
Big thanks to my friends Jack and Iain for acting as guinea pigs. It quickly became clear that both EasyJet and British Airways needed to improve their user interface. For example, the clip below shows that it must be obvious how many seats you are booking throughout the process. If you were being interrupted by small children whilst booking it would be easy to forget what you’d selected.
If you have time to watch a 5 minute clip, then Iain Shaw of Media Education (mediaeducation.co.uk) is quite entertainingly grumpy about booking flights online.
In-depth interview
For the second project I interviewed my Finnish friend Iida, who had recently booked flights to visit family in Scandinavia. For this I prepared a script and consent form. You can see the highlights of the interview below (just over 4 minutes).
Online survey
I used SurveyMonkey to distribute an 8 question survey. I kept it short to maximise the number of responses.
I developed the survey by brainstorming all the questions I could think of. As there were far too many I pruned them to target the information that would be most useful to a UX designer, focusing on the users goals, context and behaviour. To capture answers from a wider audience I shared the survey on reddit/r/samplesize and among my parents’ friends.
Despite the growing trend for mobile use, my respondents tended to book flights on a desktop or laptop computer (see below). The Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) found a similar pattern in 2018. This may be because booking flights is a complex process and therefore hard to do on a small screen. Improved user experience design for mobiles may address this issue, but for now I decided to create a booking process for use on desktop computers.
Competitive benchmarking
I actually began this project before conducting the usability tests and in-depth interviews, as it helped me to prepare my scripts. I then later updated it with the insights I had gained.
The clearest lesson was the importance of constraints. British Airways allowed me to enter dates and routes that they did not fly, wasting my time. EasyJet did have these constraints, which increased my reservoir of goodwill.
Conclusion
This research proved that the UX of flight booking websites definitely needs some improvement, which would be essential for any business case. It also pinpointed several issues that would be reasonably easy to fix, suggesting that the alterations would provide a good Return on Investment (RoI).