Hostelworld - case study
Web Reservations International (WRI) provides technology, distribution and marketing solutions to accommodation and other travel suppliers worldwide through a network of owned sites and affiliate partners. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, WRI was founded in 1999 and has representative offices in Shanghai and Sydney. WRI has developed award winning websites including hostelworld.com, hostels.com, bedandbreakfastworld.com and trav.com, and has successful affiliate relationships with many of the world's leading brands.
Background
We were contacted by WRI's flagship brand Hostelworld to provide a proposal on user testing on their existing website. They wanted early feedback on a proposed new site design which included faceted navigation followed by user testing with eyetracking to determine how representative users use the site and the response to the new features they were suggesting.
Screenshot
Challenge to meet
We were asked to gather practical insights during user interviews that would inform the design and development of the new layout and faceted navigation features and to assess if the proposed designs were working with the target audience.
Benefits and outcomes
We identified suggestions and improvements to the faceted navigation and new functionality early on in the design process. Changes were implemented and then a high fidelity prototype went through user testing to establish if further changes would need to be made to improve the usability and user experience.
What we did
We recruited 12 participants of varying age ranges and gender. These were then interviewed using a mixture of self determined and predefined tasks on the website.
How this was achieved
We ran a test over two days with 6 users per day conducting 1 hour interviews for each one. We also gathered user's opinions and thoughts by way of a survey at the end of the testing sessions to gain additional insights.
Eye tracking was used to find out which elements of the page were focused on. Eye tracking shows where people look on a page. Typical outputs include:
- Gaze path – this shows the movement of an eye including fixations where a eye remains looking at a point for longer than 0.1-0.3 seconds (enough time for the brain to process information from the eye and attend to it).
- Heatmap – this shows which areas of a page receive the most or least attention. This is normally done by aggregating gaze paths from more than one user to show hot spots and deadzones.
Spotless Interactive - Heatmap
Spotless Interactive - Gazeplot
Testimonial
We were impressed with the speed in which Spotless were able to mobilise this testing for us. Once in progress, they worked with us on the tests to maximise the time we had against the objectives we wanted to achieve. We got some great insights from our customers and were able to work these into the iterations of our designs. We have now gone live with these changes, see Hostelworld for more.
Breffni Horgan - Head of Product - Web Reservations International (WRI)
