How to make travel easier? Tripadvisor UI/UX Case study.

6 min readOct 27, 2020

Tripadvisor is a web and mobile platform that people use to compare prices on hotels, flights and cruises, book tours and experiences, as well as restaurants.

Travellers around the world use the Tripadvisor website and application to check out over 859 million comments and opinions from 8.6 million accommodations, restaurants, experiences, flights and cruises. (tripadvisor.es)

In this case study we want to analyse how this platform works and how we can improve the user experience.

Research

Skyscanner, Tripadvisor and Hopper icons.

There are several travel platforms in the market for booking flights, tours and hotels, so we will make a short analysis of three of them applying the Nielsen Heuristic principles. We chose Skyscanner, Tripadvisor and Hopper.

Several comparative aspects between the apps:

The interface of the three applications is quite clear, although in Hopper we notice a lack of content.
The travel search is very intuitive both in Skyscanner and Tripadvisor. Especially highlighting Tripadvisor, who show more options and alternatives within the home page. At Hopper this section does not stand out, as we have limited content.
Skyscanner and Hopper are easy to navigate through, whereas Tripadvisor can generate doubts with their choice of fields/buttons.
Skyscanner’s option to customize your trip in the cheapest month or to search for random destinations, is one of its most attractive features.
Within the search for hotels or flights, all the pages redirect you to a third party to finalize a reservation or a purchase. None of this is communicated beforehand by the websites.
The positive point of Skyscanner is that it maintains its aesthetics so that the user does not notice the change drastically.
A strong point of Tripadvisor is the possibility to book a larger amount of extras than in Skyscanner or Hopper, since the latter two can only book hotels and flights. The negative side of this is that it does not include transport such as taxis or car hire.
Another point in favour of Skyscanner and Tripadvisor would be the inclusion of information about the current state of COVID-19, as this is currently a very important information to take into account when travelling.
Outstanding for Tripadvisor, is their feature to program a travel plan and save it within the app.

Due to the characteristics that we want to analyse and the user persona that we have as a reference, Tripadvisor is the platform that suits best.

Context

Our user persona is a group of young people between 20 and 40 years old. They want to plan a trip to see the Great Wall of China next year. This trip will have to be adapted to everyone’s schedule and needs, as well as include leisure and culture in an economical way.

Before starting, they will do a small search for key information, such as nearby airports, currency, necessary documentation or clothing.

The aim is to try and analyse the application and see how we can make this task as simple and convenient as possible.

Interviews and results

We started with a 5 second test, showing the app to the interviewee. After that we asked him three key questions.

What did you see?
What can you do with this application?
Where would you buy a flight within the application?

The interviewee answers were all very similar, quickly capturing the main functions.

What did you see?

— “It was a travel app for finding hotels, cheap travel and tourism.” (User 5)

What can you do with this application?

— “It probably seemed to help me find a set of offers for a trip, round trip and stay.” (User 2)

Where would I buy a flight within the application?

— “In the flight icon” (User 3)

As a second research method, the same participants as in the previous test were interviewed.

We defined a common task for all participants and through what we wanted to see which problems could appear. The complexity of these interviews consisted in correctly defining a task for a specific user, taking into account their preferences and needs.

Based on the opinion of several participants, problems such as organising a complete trip, notifications or displaying errors, confusion when changing screens or confusion in some buttons were found.

We will work specifically with these cases:

Improve the “My Trips” option

Reduce the number of screens
Better organization
More intuitive

2. Notifications

Better error signalling
Clarity of messages
Informative pop-ups

3. Text on buttons

Solutions

We will start by organising the content from a paper Lo-Fi version to know what options we have.

Create a trip

We begin with the most important point for our users: the option to “Create a trip”. This tool is certainly hidden despite the potential it has. The main objective is to make it stand out and for users to use it more often, since in none of the interviews somebody knew of its existence.

The first solution would be to incorporate a small notification function in the “+” icon, and in the option to “Create a trip” , so when the user enters the application it captures their attention and decides to click on it.

Within this function, it is not very clear how you can organize the trip or how it works, so we will create a series of screens that would make the process easier, more accessible and faster. First you will search for the destination you want to go to and this will take you to a personalised screen where you can start organising your trip.

To make the process faster, when you add one of the options (flights, hotel, attraction…) you will be asked if you want to add anything else or finalize your purchase.

Notifications

As far as notifications are concerned, most users encountered an unexpected shortcoming when they had to search for a flight and forgot to enter the origin destination, as it was assumed to be the current location. Another common error was the surprise of being on Tripadvisor and that without prior alert they changed to another website to finish the reservation. The solutions for these problems would be to add visual signs of the changes that have to be filled in and a pop-up with information.

Texts

To avoid errors or confusion from users, a change in the inputs will be proposed as in changing “Where you are going”, to “Insert country or city you want to go to”. Several participants searched for the monument without getting the desired result.

Another change of text we would suggest is the “See offers” button, opting for more specific options where it would be “Go to offer” when you change application or “book/buy” when you do it directly within the application.

Interactive prototype

Here you have the link to the interactive prototype :)

https://www.figma.com/file/3bgC4DGypSs008uVzw2w5p/Tripadvisor?node-id=0%3A1

Conclusions

It is important to know how to define and explain the task well to the users, otherwise they could be misled It is also important that some don’t do the task 100%, as it is not a “real” experience and they don’t take into account all the possibilities.

In terms of timing and time compatibility, it is difficult to find participants for the interviews. Moreover, the results obtained and the solutions are of course under my personal experience, having a reduced number of respondents and working on this type of project for the first time. Probably, depending on the users, other problems will arise, so these are only the solutions I propose regarding my interviews.

Thanks for reading ! I hope you found it interesting and if you want to , you can share your opinion in the comments section.opinions you can leave it in comments.