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. By creating and designing wireframes, we can give users a general idea of what our application will look like and give them a better understanding of how it will work, even without having the finished product available in their hand.
Cognitive Walkthrough: For our research method, we got a fellow UX designer to conduct a cognitive walkthrough on one of our wireframes. The wireframe we decided to get feedback on was “Find Nearby Restaurants”. We included our persona “John” and a scenario to help the UX designer get a better understanding of what interaction the wireframe is meant to encapsulate. The cognitive walkthrough was done to get feedback on how we can improve our wireframes and Budget Travel’s overall design in order to minimize confusion and give users a better experience.
Informal Feedback: The SE team presented what they created based on the UX Team’s sketches, wireframes, and general ideas for Budget Travel. After both the UX and SE teams met up, the SE team explained the feedback they received:
One finding from the cognitive walkthrough was that users get confused if there is not an obvious next step to take. For example, when creating/editing a trip, users may get confused about what to do next. Perhaps they start to press different buttons to see if something happens to give them additional information about what to do next.
From the Informal Feedback some findings were that users highlighted a need for a Roadtips feature which could differentiate Budget Travel from other saturated booking apps. With this feature, users can select their destination and budget, similar to planning a road trip. They should also have the ability to choose specific stops along the way and plan activities based on those locations. A second finding is that users expressed the desire to filter activities based on their budget. This finding let us know that we need to incorporate budget-related features in our design. Other findings involved the activity where the users were interested in seeing other users’ activity, which would be categorized as a “Trending” or “Popular” trips tab where the user would be able to see popular choices from other users. The last finding involved the launch page where users preferred not to see a sales pitch when first opening the app and they suggested having a login or sign-up page as the initial screen to reduce confusion and provide users with clear instructions.
Based on our findings from the cognitive walkthrough, we realized that it is best to provide users with more information, even if something seems obvious. Often times it is better if a user has too much information rather than too little.
Another conclusion is that we need to include more buttons. In our wireframes, we failed to include “back” and “next” buttons, which led to some confusion. Not only will additional buttons help users know that there are more steps to take, but they can also provide a sort of error prevention since users can go back to a previous page.
Some new discoveries derived from the Informal Feedback is that the desire to see other users’ activities and trending or popular trips points to the importance of user-generated content. Encourage users to share their trip plans, reviews, and recommendations. Design features that allow users to contribute their experiences and insights, creating some type of community and trust within the app. To enhance user engagement and satisfaction we need to improve the overall user experience and consider introducing personalization features. The preference for a login or sign-up page over a sales pitch lets us know the importance of a seamless onboarding process and we will need to modify our design where we focus on ensuring a straightforward path to creating an account and getting started.
Our cognitive walkthrough was done by only one UX designer. While we were given valuable feedback, it only represents a single perspective. As such, it may not capture the full range of potential user experiences and preferences. A more comprehensive study involving multiple designers or actual users could provide a broader understanding. Usability testing with real users in realistic scenarios can provide more concrete insights into how users interact with the application and identify usability issues. Something else that we need to take into consideration is that user preferences change over time; what users desire today may not be the same in the future, so continuous research and updates to the design are necessary to remain relevant.