online hotel booking application - design process

Online Hotel Booking Application

ByChayapathi,Bachelor’s of Design,IIT Guwahati.

Overview

Start Introduction Design process Prototypes Develop Deliver

Introduction - Background

Online hotel booking gave a new dimension for the regular hotel booking system in India and the process.

Everyone has unique expectations when it comes to booking a hotel online, now online booking facilitates and gives the user with an opportunity to reach their expectation. It can be an awesome experience, as long as the process isn’t too frustrating.

In this project I’m going to focused majorly on the betterment of user experience through a process.

Research Analyze & Ideate Prototype

Design Process

Research Contextual Inquiries &

Survey

Competitive Analysis

Stakeholder Interview

Stakeholder interviews

It is a fact that there are many players in the market for online hotel bookings and there are many stakeholders involved in the system who are involved with the process and system.

My main objective from the stakeholder interview is to find out the target audience groups and their needs, have taken the interviews of three operations managers from one of the top among the players in the market Rooms.

Operation managers are the SPOC for the guest. Each operations team consists of one CX, one cluster manager and one operations manager where operation manager leads the team, they will be handling the guests right from the booking to the checkout and in the meantime they collects feedback from the guests about the stay and booking experience.

Stakeholder interviews

The majority of users are from corporate sector, Tourism Sector and Events sector.

Competitive Analysis

Examination of the competitors, as there are many online hotel booking applications I’ve selected three among top 5 applications for the process.

OYO Rooms, Goibibo and Make My trip

The main goal of competitive analysis in this case is to Identify the best practices in use in order to reach the user expectation and find a better implementation.

Competitive Analysis - User expectations Factor

In general exploring competitor apps gives us with an opportunity to discover what is commonly being offered via similar applications. If all the competitors are offering certain functionality and features, user will likely to expect similar functionality from the new players and thus I’ve done the quick comparison of content and functionality across competitors.

Use case generated by comparing the three apps

1. Launch screen2. Search page3. Search and select location4. Listing page5. Sort and select a hotel6. Hotel individual page7. Enter booking details and

Click Select Room8. Review Booking Page9. Payments page

Contextual Inquiry & Survey

Interviewed three users who book online and travel often, one product designer, one business analyst and one proprietor of a local business. The interviews were conducted like contextual enquiry where user shared information about their work roles and the questions were asked in relation to their online hotel booking experience and emphasized on finding out the goals and needs. All the interview data was documented quickly.

And a user survey was conducted with a section based questionnaire list and collected the data about the users likes and disliked from the process, also collected data of feature wise satisfactory levels.

Analyze &Ideate Design BriefUser

PersonaAffinity

Analysis

Affinity Analysis – Extraction of user needs and problems

User Survey

We have analyzed the user survey and obtained quantitative data which gave us the insights about online hotel booking and user needs. Here are questionnaires along with the obtained data.

Thank YouThank You

Open booking page...Insert Location...Insert dates...Click Search...Go to results page...Use Filters...Select a Hotel...Select Room...Click Book...Got to payments page.

Affinity Analysis

Observations – User survey

The major concerns and needs of the user based on the survey are.

• Cancellation Freedom• Accuracy in the details provided• Trust Factor with Reviews and Ratings• Quick booking and easy navigation• Timing constraints

User


Contextual Inquiries

On completion of Interviews all documented data was analyzed and identified the user needs and grouped them in a hierarchical way.


Contextual Inquiries

Comparing the observations from user survey and contextual inquiry to identify the key issues and needs.

• Easy booking and navigation• Cancellation Freedom• My Bookings with saved drafts• Accuracy in data provided• Quick Support• Booking price and ATI pricing Variation


Brainstorming

A brainstorming session was conducted to generate the solutions for the identified key issues and needs.


Key Issues Identified

Easy booking and navigation:

Cancellation Freedom:

My Bookings with saved drafts:

Accuracy in data provided:

Quick Support:

Booking price and ATI pricing Variation:

Proposed Solution

Single Page with tabs for booking process

Availability of pay at hotel option with a spare time to cancel the booking.

My booking float button with saved drafts will help the user to check out some quick details from previous bookings.

Providing the data what users want to see rather than providing the data what have.

Quick support option for user while making a booking will help them to choose a better option.

Pricing displayed should always be inclusive of all taxes.

Affinity Analysis – Solutions

Proposed Solution

The main pages that user navigates through in the booking process after selecting a location are Listings, Property and Review & book. Keeping these three options visible throughout the process will make it easy for user to navigate and certainly the process looks pretty easy with just 3 steps.

Availability of pay at hotel option allows user to reserve the room and incase if there is any change in the plan he can just cancel the booking and there will be no hassle for refund, in some cases this option can be a persuasive decider between you and the other competitors.

At times user may loose internet connection in middle of the booking process or accidentally closes the application or payment timeout or in any such situations if the current booking has got saved automatically as a draft for certain time will make it easy for the user to resume and complete process from where it has got interrupted. Availability of my booking through out the process will allow user to check or import some details from any of the past bookings if needed.

Affinity Analysis – Solutions

Proposed Solution

Property page is very important page which makes user to finalize the booking so the information displayed here should be very accurate and effective, through the brainstorming session I’ve identified the most important details after location that a user looks for in hierarchical order. HQ Photographs, User Ratings, Facilities, Pricing, Deals, and Policies(if made visible).

User may have many quarries while booking, if there is a call support for the users through out the process he can clarify all the quarries and complete the booking with a happy and relaxed mind. This facility can also pull in the elder people as a new set of users (future perspective).

It is very painful to book a 2000 room and pay 2500 rupees after including all taxes, the pain is ₹ ₹just because user expects that he gets the room at original price and at the end he gets to know that he should pay 500 rupees extra and thus ends up on a sad note after all the process. Displaying the price Inclusive of all taxes right from the first page to the end page prepares the user to pay the displayed amount and the deal for the booking reduces small amount and that makes the user to end up on a happy note.

User Personas

Design Brief

Proposed Solution

I am going to design a mobile hotel booking application which make the booking process easy for the user.

Through the design process that focused on the user needs we have identified the key issues and needs for the betterment of the booking experience and below mentioned are the major changes that we will deploy in our new design.

Easy booking and navigationCancellation FreedomMy Bookings with saved draftsAccuracy in data providedQuick SupportBooking price and ATI pricing Variation

PrototypingVisual Design

Wireframes& Use Cases

Information Architecture

Launch Screen Sign Up Search Page Booking Page

Listings

Property

Page

Review & Pay

• Menu• Check In and Out

Details• Enter Location• Current Location• Recent Searches• Popular

Locations• Search

• Search/Change Location

• My Account

• Quick Support

• Properties List• Property Names• Location• Pricing/Night• Star Rating• User Rating• Dates• Sort Option• Filters Option• Map Mode

• Hotel Name• Location• Booking Details• Payment Options• proceed

• Property Name & Location

• Pricing & Ratings• Share & Favorite• Map Location & Weather

Forecast• Facilities• Booking Details• Payable Amount• Apply Coupon• Important Notes• Guest policy Statement• Book now

Information Architecture

Saved DraftsPrevious bookingsWallet

Quick CallFAQ

Use Case

Splash screenRegisterEnter plan detailsSearch and select LocationEnter bookings pageSearch and select hotel from listingCheck detailsApply coupon/DealBook roomEnter review and pay pageCheck your booking detailsSelect payment optionsProceedAcknowledgement Page

Wireframes (tentative)Wireframes are created in Balsamiq Mockup and here are the main screens

Splash screen Search screen Bookings• Hotels listing screen• Individual hotel screen• Review & book screen Thank you screen

Visual design (tentative)A tentative Quick and Dirty Prototyping was done using Justin mind Prototyper tool, here are the screens and you can access the same using the below link.

http://picmeservices.in/chapps/proto

User Testing and Redesigning multiple times gives us the final commercial design, very few assumptions were made the logo, the number used on thankyou screen and the other is that no multiple types of rooms per each hotel.

Thank You