Budget Travel is meant to help simplify its users’ trip-planning experience by providing an easy-to-understand interface that helps walk them through the process. With Budget Travel, users can make hotel reservations, book flights, and plan activities all in one place.
Competitive Analysis by conducting research on competitors (such as Travelocity, Trivago, TravelSpend, TripCoin, Hotels, and Tricount). The main purpose of a competitive analysis is to know more about the leading competitors, such as their strengths, weaknesses, and quality. The findings of a competitive analysis help when deciding what features to offer or any additional improvements that can be made. In addition, competitive analysis helps find areas where competitors may be lacking. For our competitive analysis, we recorded what the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses were, such as layout, aesthetics, trustworthiness, ease of navigation, price, customer service, services offered, platform, and overall quality. Reading customer reviews can also be beneficial since users are giving feedback based on their experience.
Heuristic Evaluation where one competitor is further evaluated to see how well it can accomplish a specific user goal. The primary purpose of a Heuristic Evaluation is to see how well a product’s design is and how well users understand it. The competitor (Travelocity) was evaluated on ten heuristics (visibility of system status, match between system and the real world, user control and freedom, consistency and standards, error prevention, recognition rather than recall, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and minimalist design, help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors, and help and documentation). The main purpose of a heuristic evaluation is not only to see how well a product’s design is but also how well users understand it. Heuristic evaluations find potential problems for users and can help improve the user’s experience.
Personas were created to get a better idea of who Budget Travel’s potential users are. They were created with certain goals in mind, such as: having a simplified way to plan vacations, being able to set a spending budget for a trip, and being able to plan a trip based on suggestions from Budget Travel.
Scenarios were created based on the personas and the different situations that users may be in such as: taking a group vacation, going solo, or being a first-time traveler. As such, the finished scenarios give additional background information for the personas and help us understand how they can potentially interact with Budget Travel.
Based on our research, specifically the competitive analysis, we found that most competitors have a lack of customer support. Although some competitors have chatbots that help with general questions, it is challenging to resolve complex issues with virtual assistants. In addition, it’s difficult to get in contact with an actual representative, as some competitor’s websites make it difficult to find contact information such as telephone numbers or emails.
Another finding from the competitive analysis is that some competitors were found to have problems concerning canceled flights or reservations. In reviews, users reported that their hotels were never booked despite paying and that they were not refunded.
From the heuristic analysis, we found that a good website design/layout helps reduce confusion about where to look for certain features or options. Travelocity, the competitor analyzed, has a simple but effective layout. The different pages (Stays, Flights, Cars, Packages, etc.) are at the top and they all have similar designs, with how the text fields are set up and how the results show up.
When working on the competitive analysis highlighted a lack in the customer support offerings of our competitors. Users faced challenges in reaching representatives and getting help resolving issues. This discovery suggests that most users want a reliable support system when they encounter problems during their trip-planning journey.
Another finding from our research was that some competitors had encountered issues related to canceled flights or reservations leading to user frustration. This discovery lets us know that users want to make sure that their bookings will be safe and trustworthy and that they will receive help or a message if any type of cancellations or issues were to occur.
The creation of personas and scenarios allowed us to take a user-centered approach to design. It showed us the different needs and preferences of some potential users.
Based on the findings, we would like to develop a user-friendly customer support system. Offering help support and to make sure that our users can easily find and access customer support.
Based on the findings if we want to build trust and reliability we will need to improve the booking and reservation processes. Create a clear and helpful communication channel to notify our users of any changes or cancellations and to make sure that we give the users a user-friendly refund policy.
Utilize the personas and scenarios to design features for the various user goals we created. Make sure that we have personalization options that will allow our users to set their unique travel preferences, budgets, and trip styles.
These recommendations will help us shape our future work for Budget Travel. We will make sure that we are able to give the users something they want and need and will be able to give customer support and bokking trust.
Our competitive analysis focused on a specific set of competitors, and the findings may not represent all of our different competitors out there. The personas and scenarios that we created were created based on our assumptions and research, which might not fully capture the whole different potential users. We also need to make sure that we look for new day-to-day competitors in the same category and to make sure that we keep our users’ wants and needs up to date.