Trip Advisor - Analysis and evaluation

Presentation

Trip Advisor is a website created in 2000 that allows its user to plan their trip by providing tools and advice to choose hotels, restaurants, flights. It allows the users to post reviews and rate their experience, to provide to all the other travelers relevant and updated information about the possible destinations. It also allows easily to book a slot in the chosen hotel/restaurant/etc.

For mobile users, a Trip Advisor application is available and provides most of the features of the website, redesigned to maximize the user experience with a small screen and focused on the user’s current location.

Pros:

- Lots of content

- Forum to discuss with other users

- Reviews from the other travelers allow to get a better idea of the places

- Makes it easy to book stuff

- Android app: It is possible to download city guides for offline access

Cons

- Authenticity of the reviews can be dubious

- Internet access needed

- Website: the interface can be overwhelming at first

- User generated content means that the notation is not always relevant (e.g. user having a bad day will want to give a bad review based on that exceptional occurrence)

- I personally don’t trust third party booking websites and would rather go to the company/place’s website or make a call.

Think aloud evaluation

• Task 1: “You have 2 free hours and the weather is nice. You are looking for an outdoor visit”

The tester did not face too many problems, except for choosing the location. By default, the selection says “Current location”. He thought it was asking him to set a location and tried various entries (“KTH”, then “Stockholm”). Then it was easy to find a close attraction, as they are conveniently displayed on a map.

• Task 2: “You are looking for a cheap place where you can sleep tonight and that provides an internet access.”

The tester could easily specify most criterias of his search: the location wasn't changed from the last  search, filters allow to choose required amenities (require free internet) and to display only available rooms. However, he found hard to choose the date, going through a few pages of the calendar to select the current date. He didn't find how to sort by prices, and the hotel class filter only allows “greater than” type selections, making it hard to display only cheap options. Since the hotels are also separated in three classes (Hotels, B&B, Others), he went through all of them, making a new search each time to compare the results.

Highlights:

The tester found the application easy to use but not very flexible: the filters are not customizable, and it is not possible for example to look for hotels with a class lower than a chosen value. He also didn't like that is impossible to change the sorting order of the results.