Assessment of Google Flights

Lanny Chung

Bentley University

Outline

The Task My Assessment Methodologies: Focus Group Methodologies: Heuristic Evaluations Overall Results Potential Changes What I learned

Task

Assume you have been hired by Google to improve its’ flight search capabilities (https://www.google.com/flights/)The team is interested in both your assessment of the tool as a user researcher, as well as hearing what user research methodologies you would use if you were truly tasked with this problem.

My Assessment

The good:

It is a simple site to search for flight tickets.

I can find tickets relatively quickly.

Some things to improve on:

Overall design in plain.

Lacked features compared to its competitors.

Confusing when trying to purchase a ticket.

Overall, I thought Google Flight is an average travel search engine.

VS.

Focus Group

Conducted a test with 4 people individually.

Asked questions and gave tasks.

Observed their screens.

Asked the participants to speak out loud what they were thinking.

Questions

Asked around 10 questions For example:

Before: What do you expect when using a travel search engine?

Task: Find the quickest, nonstop, and first class ticket from Boston to London.

After: How did you feel about this travel search engine?

Focus Group Results

Participants:

Expect a simple and quick search engine that finds them their desired flight ticket.

Want to see prices that compare different airlines to find tickets with the best value.

Thought the duration scrubber, under the More tab, was inconvenient.

Took some time to figure out how to purchase their flight tickets.

Overall, they liked the site because it was simple.

Would use the site again to purchase flight tickets.

Some preferred to other flight search engines.

Heuristic Evaluation

Advantages:

General rules that can be applied any website to see how well the user interface is made.

Quick way to evaluation a website.

A good way to find potential errors.

Disadvantage:

Multiple evaluations should be applied.

Must fully understand the evaluations to apply the heuristics effectively.

Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

"the king of usability" (Internet Magazine) "the guru of Web page usability" (The New York Times)

All the words are easily understood. Programming or complex words are not used (Match between system and the real world).

Not a clear way to exit from features (tabs, calendar) (User control and freedom).

No help service (Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors).

Site Map

Homepage Outbound Page

Return Page Purchase Page

Purchase ticket

Itinerary + Cost

Credit Card Information

More

Times

Potential Change

Shortest Duration

What I learned

During a focus group, having the participants talking out loud what they are thinking is very helpful.

Heuristic Evaluation. Even sites from big name companies can be

improved.

Questions and Answers?

Sources Used

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/

http://www.nngroup.com/people/jakob-nielsen/

http://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/heuristic-evaluation.html