Usability Testing

I was challenged to solve a pain point on Home Away’s e-commerce site with a specific user persona in mind. My goal was to increase the usability of the website for a group of the population represented by a single persona.

My Role

User Testing

Prototyping

Ideation

Testing The site with users

I conducted usability testing to try and support my hypothesis (Spoiler alert: It didn't) that users want more personalized customer support. I interviewed 4 individuals who met 90% of the user persona criteria and had never seen the site before.

observations

My biggest finding from talking with users was most people weren’t interested in using any of the filter features. When asked why, users said most filters on websites felt inaccurate. By being specific with their search, the users felt like filters could actually drop options that met their criteria. One user was able to show that there was a difference in the filtered results when she searched between her phone and her desktop. 3 out of 4 users were frustrated by having to swipe so many times to just see what the interior of the rental space looked like.

The Solution

By refining the display of listed pictures, I can improve the user’s search results without requiring that they use the filter options. I chose to divide the photos into 3 categories: interior photos, exterior photos, nearby photos and an “all photos” option. This way, users have the freedom to quickly navigate to the photos they are most interested in seeing.

Preliminary testing indicate that this change does improve SUS (System Usability Scale) scores up from 62 to a score of 70.