Hurtigruten - case study
For more than 115 years Hurtigruten have been a part of the coastal areas of Norway with a fleet of some 13 ships. With their experience in polar areas the company have become an international travel industry company with a unique product.
Background
We were contacted by Hurtigruten to provide international lab based usability testing on their existing website across three key markets (UK, Germany, and Norway). We were also asked to run a remote unmoderated usability testing project and to run a survey to find out more about the profiles of their customer base.
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Challenge to meet
We were asked to gather practical insights during user testing that would inform the design and development of the site going forwards.
Hurtigruten customers and potential customers were identified as being an older age demographic (age 55+) and a niche profile, which would make the recruitment process much harder and more involved. With this age demographic we were expecting a higher than anticipated drop out rate on the remote unmoderated usability testing and we would need to allow more time for these participants to be recruited online and also for completing tasks during usability testing.
Benefits and outcomes
We identified suggestions and improvements to the existing site that could be implemented globally as well as changes that could be introduced at a local country level. We produced a report for each market that captured key issues from the user testing, including areas such as cabin pages, address finder pages, cruise landing pages and user journeys through to the final purchasing page. We also produced a summarised report with an issue list of the key issues across all three markets.
We produced a report of the results of the remote unmoderated usability testing across all three countries, including analysis of the click stream data, task completion time, task success ratios and click map analysis data.
What we did
For the lab based usability testing we recruited in total 36 participants (12 per country) working with two partner companies Savigny user research in Germany and Netlife research in Norway. Each country ran a baseline of tests with some market specific variations and recruitment was handled at a local level. We recruited participants made up of existing and prospective customers of varying age ranges and gender. These were then interviewed using a mixture of self determined and predefined tasks on the website. We allowed for exploration using self determined (or freeform tasks as they are also known).
For the remote unmoderated usability testing we recruited in total 300 participants (100 per country) working with two partner panel providers Toluna and Survey Sampling International. We designed a series of tasks for the users to complete and translated these for the German and Norwegian markets.
How this was achieved
We ran the UK usability test over two days on the existing site with 6 users per day with 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. We then ran the other two country tests through our partner agencies. The testing had a strong focus on the booking engine and the end to end customer journey from the initial visit to the site through to the final payment screen.
We designed the remote unmoderated usability testing tasks along side the lab based usability testing and launched these allowing time to collect and analyse the data. We worked with a remote user experience research tool called UserZoom. We had to design validation criteria such as a participant reaching the correct URL as well as allowing the participant to self certify when they had found a correct answer based on the task.
Testimonial
Spotless carried out web usability testing for us across three of our global markets, UK, Germany and Norway, Ben and his team were very professional, friendly and extremely helpful in making sure as a company we achieved our goals and the most we could out of the tests. Ben understood us as a niche travel company and our requirements; he made sure that all our local and global needs were adhered to.
Spotless usability expertise was very evident, this was highlighted in the way the lab tests, survey and user based tasks were carried out so efficiently meaning that we achieved some very valuable insights.
First class reporting clearly presented the findings in a series of insightful reports and excellent presentations for each market. These findings were easy to absorb and due to the real practical advice and suggested solutions we were presented with, we were able to make instant improvements to our websites that lead to an increase in conversions and revenue quickly. I hope to work with Ben and his team again in the near future.
Sarah Haynes - Marketing Executive Web - Hurtigruten
