Learning Activity 1.2
My partner and I travel often. We take at least one trip overseas each year and although we have a travel agent whom we trust to find us great deals on flights, one thing we like to do for ourselves is find our accommodation. If you know where to look and have the patience, there are some great deals to be found. You aren’t starved for choice when it comes to the number of accommodation websites you can subscribe to. Most of them offer a similar service and selection of hotels across the world. Some are better than others and others are simply appalling.
For the purpose of this exercise however, I’ve chosen to review one of my partners preferred sites www.hotelclub.com. I have not used the site myself before so thought this site would be a good candidate for me to get the full ‘user experience’.
The ‘About Us’ page of the website states: ‘HotelClub is a world leading global accommodation website offering hotel and accommodation bookings for up to 12 months in advance. Established in 1996, HotelClub provides consumers with over 48,000 accommodation choices in over 5,600 cities worldwide throughout 126 countries.
HotelClub is a truly global offering with its services available in fourteen languages including: Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, Thai, Russian and Dutch.’
Initially www.hotelclub.com, although compact (in other words everything looks small particularly the font size), the site looks clean and clearly laid out. There are some animated graphics attracting your attention sprouting deals etc but they’re not so distracting that they would make you want to click out. What I did find a little distracting at first though was where to start. There are a lot of options, quick search, log in, sign up, specials etc.
Outline below are some of the more obvious user issues I encounter using the site:
Home page, simple clean design but where do you start?
Hotel Club offers members dollars for every booking you make with them. It isn’t clear whether or not you have to be a member to access the site or to make a booking. Membership is free however and there is a prompt on the home page to ‘Join the Club’.
The sign up process is fairly uneventful requesting basic information eg. email address, selecting a password and contact details. Once you’ve completed the form you are taken to a confirmation page. This is the first of many pages where the page format goes from being contain within a frame centered in the window to a full screen format.
A different page format?
In fact, throughout the site, it seems that the set information pages follow one format and pages that are content managed follow another. Pages that feature the other services have a left aligned format. The masthead and navigation remains constant throughout the site, but with the pages flipping from one format to the next this can become a little disconcerting.
Searching... Intense!
Another point about the navigation is that in the ‘My Club’ section of the website, the navigation is doubled up. It is only in this section that this happens. I felt is was both unnecessary and confusing. The reason for this is, once signed in the website takes you to the ‘My Club’ page. The secondary navigation on the right of the page is more prominent than the top navigation that features on every other page. So when clicking away from the ‘My Club’ section I found myself searching for the navigation.
Searching for accommodation is fairly simple. Basic search parameters are required: country, city, number of stars etc.
As far as the user experience though, the returned results are actually quite daunting. The search page almost feels like it is shouting at you. Depending on the area you are searcing for you can be confronted with hundreds of options. The top of the page lists two or three of ‘most popular’ hotels. I am suspicious of this though as they could be paid for positions on the page.
The site gives a good overview for each hotel, including an image gallery, customer reviews, facilities etc. The reviews are questionable though as with one example that apparently had 34 reviews, but only two available to read.
With so many hotels on their books, it’s understandable that the search results are plentiful, great if you have the time to spend looking through them. The process is clunky and doesn’t offer (that I can see) a facility to save ‘favourites’ while you are searching through the hotel search results.
There also seems to be some problems with the site running on both Safari and Firefox with buttons etc being out of alignment. There are also a couple of functionality issues with missing search buttons on some pages.
