Overview & Problem Statement
Improving the in-app user experience
Expedia.com is an online travel agency offering accommodations, flights, car rentals, activities, and travel bundle deals.
When a friend in the UK planned a holiday with Expedia and faced trouble navigating the app, I downloaded the Expedia app on my phone and discovered that the app suffers from some design drawbacks.
The microcopy of one of the core navigation elements of the mobile app, the Account section on the tab doesn’t address all user needs, contains jargon, and some superfluous information.
My high-level goals were to:
1. Make it fast and easy to use for everyone, everywhere.
2. Give travellers more control over their time and money.
User & Audience
Travellers across the world
People 18 and above, speaking English or any other language, across the world use the app to plan their travel.
Scopes & Constraint
1. A small pool of users for the user testing
2. The mockup microcopy hasn’t been through actual A/B testing
Process & What I Did
Type of research: competitor research, user testing, and user reviews
1. Conducted user testing with 3 friends
2. Researched hundreds of app reviews on Google Play Store
3. Incorporated frustrations of the traveller who booked their holiday with Expedia
4. Conducted competitor research with mobile apps of other popular online travel agency like Booking.com, Airbnb, etc.
Expedia’s mobile app reviews in Google Play Store revealed that users experienced serious navigation issues. When they wanted to take a certain action (find trip itinerary or book a trip), the experience was frustrating and confusing.
Findings from the research
1. Selecting the language and currency are often the starting points of the users’ journey on a travel agency’s app.
Usability tests revealed that the app didn’t allow its users to pick the language and currency of its choice. If an English speaker living in The Netherlands wanted to plan a holiday in the US, the app’s design made it very hard to achieve this.
I have replaced ‘Available points’ and ‘Country’ with Language and Currency to address these concerns, in the order of priority.
2. Play Store reviews revealed that users often lost their credit or loyalty points in mistaken travel bookings apart from the overall navigation issues.
a) Expedia has a whole gamut of virtual currency that can be used as real currency to make payments or avail discounts for bookings made through Expedia. These include airline credits, promotional vouchers, coupons issued for cancelled trips, rewards, and Nectar points. ‘Expedia wallet’ would be a more representative name for this combined virtual currency as against the term ‘Coupons and credits’.
b) ‘Expedia rewards program’ can take you to the user’s current loyalty status and how they can become join Expedia’s rewards program.
Under the Account category, I have replaced ‘coupons and credits’ with ‘Expedia wallet’ and ‘Expedia rewards program’.
Expedia’s mobile app reviews in Google Play Store also revealed that the ‘coupons and credits’ microcopy was not a comprehensive term for the whole gamut of virtual currency offered by Expedia.
3. Competitor research revealed that the option to save a property for future use is missing.
Under the Account category, I have added the ‘Saved properties’ as an option.
4. For brevity and in line with the names of other categories, which are one or two-word nouns, I renamed the ‘How can we help you?’ category as ‘Support’.
5. I clubbed all other important fields belonging to different categories under the ‘Other Important Links’ category. It helps to keep a minimalist user interface that offers solutions soon after turning the app on.
Before
After
Expected Outcome & Results
Increased mobile app downloads and app usage
When the mobile app is equally functional as the website, increased app downloads and usage and fewer calls to customer service should be the first measures of success.