EZ hotel

EZ hotel website allows travelers to spend less time comparing the hotel rate/room details to get the best deal. It eliminates the chaos of opening lots of website tabs, clicking the update search button repeatedly, making the hotel booking easier than ever.

Every travelers need to go through a time-consuming process to get their ideal best deal. (spend less with better quality/rewards)

• They need to compare the best deal in different hotel booking websites. 
• After choosing the hotel, they have to look at the room details if these fit their needs.
• The floating rate triggers them to go back and forth to change their check-in and check-out dates in order to get the cheapest price.

Interviews with 3 different people, age 30-40, M/F

• They prefer to stay in the hotel because it’s more reliable, convenient (put the luggages) , and less contact with strangers. 
• They look at the room pictures and read the descriptions carefully. If the lighting is not good, or carpet with stains, they’ll choose another one.
• They’ll spend time reading the reviews in different ways. One reads the best & worst reviews. One read the 3 worst reviews if he can tolerate the same situation.
• They at least visit two hotel websites to do the price comparison.
• They tend to change their check-in/check-out dates and try to get the less expensive deal.

GOALS & NEEDS

• No need to update the check-in/check-out dates all the time to see the best rate
• Ways to minimize the hotel search/booking steps
• Save time making the notes and share with friends

After the user interviews, I figured out that most of them do the hotel booking at laptops so they can do the comparison or read the hotel details clearly.

Most users don't want to sign up too many websites, so how to make the user-friendly website is really important. 

With the card sorting testing, it's easier for me to think about how the user group the related items.

During the paper prototype testing, I just realized that asking the users to check the hotels to do the price comparison is annoying.

They would like to see the rate comparison, but they don’t need to do any extra clicks. Less clicking or less pop-up windows or less advertisements are what they are looking for.

After refining the paper prototype testing results, it's time to deal with the real layout

https://invis.io/EKOZDLGU5N3

While working on the prototype projects, at first I created all the boards in Xd. It can easily work between Adobe Illustrator and XD. However, while I want to do the test, it seems XD is not user-friendly. Therefore, I went back to InVision, which I can test the prototype easier on the laptop and the mobile (app). The struggle is that on the real screen, even the 1 pixel is very crucial. There are lots of times that I need to go back and forth between the boards and fix the minor pixel changes. Also, how to connect all the boards right is important. During the test, I figured out that if you visit one board, you’ll get stuck and nowhere to go.

Because of the previous paper prototype testing, the users are looking for clear information, less distraction (less clicks) hotel booking website. Therefore, the map and the hotel selections are putting together. Also, the users seriously choose the ideal hotel during the task scenario, so I added the bed specs for more details. Moreover, I edited the wording from “View Deal” to “Choose”, which makes more sense to the users.