HotelTonight Case Study
HotelTonight is a mobile app that allows people to book hotels at discounted rates up to 100 days in advance of a stay.
HotelTonight has become an extremely useful app for busy professionals, so I set out to explore if there were any feature optimizations that could be made in order to improve the user experience and help these time-constrained travelers accomplish their goal more quickly. After a round of validation testing I determined that a redesign of the filter function shows promise for increasing the functionality for the app across their target audiences.
*Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Hotel Tonight and set out to explore optimizations for the app independently.
Guerrilla Testing
I determined that the quickest way to start looking for pain points would be through guerrilla usability testing. I tested with 6 people, all within the target demographic, only one of whom was familiar with and had previously used the app. I asked them several general use questions and then asked them to use the app to perform a series of tasks revolving around selecting and booking a hotel both in a specific location and with various additional parameters.
“Please show me how you would go about choosing and booking a hotel for tonight, in San Francisco, with a $350 budget.”
Prioritizing Pain Points
Through the guerrilla testing I uncovered four main pain points:
- Confusion over the “Customize” feature - 6/6 users expressed confusion and frustration about how to use the feature to help them narrow results.
- Scroll fatigue - without the ability to set filters, users would scroll purposelessly through the various options, unsure how to compare them.
- Date selection search is unclear - 6/6 users were initially uncertain about where to click to enter a checkout date.
- Confusion over past bookings - 6/6 users fist searched the profile section for their past bookings before finding this had its own feature.
Based on this research, I developed a preliminary persona and several ‘Jobs to be Done’ in order help prioritize these pain points. I also plotted the pain points on an x/y axis denoting the importance to the customer (x) and the importance to the business (y). Because HotelTonight has targeted time-constrained professionals as their primary market for growth, I determined that the most pressing optimization that I could do would be to redesign of their ‘Customize’ feature. I hypothesized that this would eliminate confusion about the feature itself, would allow users to zero in on a hotel more quickly, and would help mitigate some of the scroll fatigue I witnessed by condensing the list of options to only those that met their search criteria.
Designing for Optimization
The design decisions I made regarding the filter revisions were centered around two pieces of information uncovered in interviews:
Users were confused about the broadly structured categories contained in the current version of the filter. HotelTonight has already separated its properties into categories that give much better information on the overall character of the property, and I decided to use these pre-existing designations as a filter for the results.
Users kept trying to figure out how to apply some sort of price filter to the properties. As business travelers typically have an expense cap on hotels set forth by their company, this felt important to address.
I hypothesized that these two features employed in tandem would allow the user greater control over their experience and would ultimately result in more bookings through a reduction of effort needed to find a property that fits booking criteria.
Prototype and Conclusions
HotelTonight sets itself apart from competitors with its simplicity and general ease of use. I proposed an optimization for their filter feature that I felt would speed up the time it took busy professionals to book a hotel using the app. In an additional round of validation testing, the modification did alleviate some of their confusion about how to find properties that met their criteria and sped up the selection and booking process. The next step in this proposal would be to properly test this change on a larger group of people using the app.
A last item of note is that one user expressed extreme frustration at the fact that although it was indicated that there were additional reviews for a hotel (often 1000+), only three were immediately visible on the hotel profile screen and there did not appear to be a way to view more. She felt that this eroded trust as it looked “easy to fake.” I decided not address this in my case study because this user was the only one to identify it as a problem, but as 4 total participants expressed that reviews were of primary or secondary importance when booking a hotel I feel it could be a second point of optimization. Moving forward, the addition of a feature where people can read more reviews could help make customers more comfortable with using HotelTonight for their hotel bookings.