Coding, debuging, testing, and crying to find a solution…

The website is designed to help mainland Chinese in Hong Kong who are going to travel abroad to Southeast Asia countries to plan their trips more easily and flexibly. Also, by connecting demand and supply, third-parties like travel agencies can hopefully solve their dilemma in profit-making. This is also the proposed monetization strategy of my website – by acting as a middle platform and get % commission after users placing an order.

Therefore, the most important feature to sustain my website would be trip customization, visa application, as well as the bookmark feature that makes all this workable. But the most basic thing is to validate whether the bookmark feature really matters to users, and whether they will register as users given information on this. Thus, the second round of usability test and first A/B test were conducted to validate these assumptions and also to identify further bugs and issues.

Usability test:
Three tasks were designed and tested with users, and post-test interview regarding perceived problems and suggestions was also conducted to see if they have further comments on the website.
1. When planning your trip on your own, how do you use the bookmark feature?
2. If you want a travel agency to help customize your trip, what would you do to get information on that?
3. Register and log in

A/B test:
While usability test helped fix some qualitative bugs, A/B test was adopted to quantatively identify the problems and validate my prior assumptions. As per the comments on my previous assignments, I believe it’s necessary to test whether the bookmark feature is important and useful enough for users. So I designed two versions of registration page with different information to see if it makes a difference to users.

The original version is a plain page with typical registration required information and a form to fill in, which is also the current version of my registration page. The variant 1 adds a tutorial of the bookmark feature right before the fill-in section to illustrate the logic behind.

The test result showed that variant 1 got slightly more form submission conversions than the original version, and google optimize also believe that variant 1 has higher probability to be the best between this two versions (54% vs. 46%). This means that users are more willing to fill in their information and register as a user of the website if given a tutorial of the bookmark feature. It kind of validated my assumptions and proved this feature to be important and useful to users.

If you want to know more about this project, please click here.