Do You Weekend

A contemporary vacation planning website major update

DYW is a start-up travel agency that aims to bring local businesses under one roof, to provide customers with the perfect travel experience. The company aims to allow customers to create their own customizable itineraries based on local deals and reviews.

The company is looking to launch the website and start its journey soon, they reached out to us hoping we can finish up the rest of the design work and help them to move on to the next step.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

“Multiple searches destroy local commerce (and yes—it’s intentional)”

— Rich, the founder of DWY

EXPLORE THE PROBLEM

The company currently has a clickable prototype that contains two major flows: Merchant flows, and Consumer flows.

The users of Merchant flows are the local business owners, they can create a business profile and post deals for sale.

On the other hand, the Consumer flows mainly serve everyday customers, who can search, customize, and purchase activities.

The Provided Existing Prototype

(Screenshots of the original prototype, all right reserved DYW inc.)

The project has had multiple design phases, which means at this point the company had worked with several design teams to complete multiple deliverables for this website, with some being successful and some being scrapped.

The project was handed to our team in its latter phases, with that being said, we still discovered numerous problems with the prototype after a careful inspection. We planned to study their existing high-fidelity prototype and wanted to find solutions to reduce the friction of the client and move on to the next phase.

Right now, the company is still not able to launch the website and begin to monetize because the website prototype is not fully developed and unable to launch.

THE PROBLEM

• Assure the merchant users are able to create a business profile and post deals and advertisements under the profile page so that they can bring in revenue value by attracting customers.

• Assure the consumer customer users are able to find deals, purchase deals, and create itineraries so that they can attend events.

After reviewing and researching the handoff documents from the previous design teams, we discovered that the prototype had never been tested by real users, to find out if it is usable and functional!

We would not recommend our clients send prototypes into development without a proper usability test, because we cannot ensure the product’s functions, features, and overall purpose are in line with what real users want. Thus, our best solution to the task is to conduct usability tests on both merchant and consumer flows, getting feedback from real people, to fix any issues that cause confusion and chaos.

The first thing we did was to observe and review the original prototype, that was how we uncovered that the prototype itself has many flaws, such as missing screens, dead ends, unresponsive components, etc.

We would not gain accurate and valuable information by testing with the problematic prototype, because the users would not treat this as a real website. We decided to start by conducting a screen audit of the existing prototype and try to fix as many obvious issues as possible.

We divided our team of 4 designers into two groups to fix the obvious issues and at least allow the prototype to run smoothly for the usability test. I and teammate Caleb were in charge of the merchant flow, since the existing flow had too many problems, we had to recreate a new merchant

We then typed out the merchant flow test plan and test script, aiming to find out if a merchant user can register their business, and create a “deal post” under their profile page.

The usability tests were done successfully the following week, we tested the merchant flows with 5 local business owners, and tested the consumer flows with 5 voluntary participants who often book trips online.

We came across some usability issues, and we divided them into three urgency levels, however, only the highlighted lines were approved to fix by the client in this iteration for time’s sake

TEST RESULT SYNTHESIS AND ISSUES

(A screenshot from the synthesis session, click to see details)

Critical Issues

Merchant CTA is unclear, merchant users mistook “register” on the main home page as merchant sign-up CTA (Merchant site)

Unclear what dashboard tabs are before clicking them (M)

Unclear what licensing is needed and why (M)

The quiz flow is too long, and participants lose patience easily(Consumer site)
What makes this site special? (M)

Users need to know how can they will get paid as a merchant (M)

No clear example of ROI (C)

Different rating systems caused confusion, one is the DYW rating, and one is the customer rating. (C)

"Who are you planning for?" screen does not ask for a headcount (C)

If a user didn't know the answer to a question yet or was flexible, they did not have the option of skipping a question (C)

Needs more details on business hours, etc. (C)

THE NEXT STEP AND TESTIMONIAL

We recommend the client conduct one more usability test before proceeding to the development phase. Although with our iteration, we can confidently say that the prototype can work seamlessly, and is ready for the launching stage.

The DYW founder, Rich, is very satisfied with our team and our service. He believes that he is one step closer to launching the start-up and achieving his dream, as he put it:

“This was an amazing team, and each member worked as a team and individually, and no communication was missed despite working remotely across different time zones.”