Assessment of Google Flights Lanny Chung Junior at Bentley University

Outline  The Task  My Assessment  Methodologies: Focus Group  Methodologies: Heuristic Evaluations  Overall Results  Potential Changes  What I learned

Task  Assume you have been hired by Google to improve its’ flight search capabilities ( The team is interested in both your assessment of the tool as a user researcher, as well as hearing what user research methodologies you would use if you were truly tasked with this problem.

My Assessment  The good:  It is a simple site to search for flight tickets.  I can find tickets relatively quickly.  Some things to improve on:  Overall design in plain.  Lacked features compared to its competitors.  Confusing when trying to purchase a ticket.  Overall, I thought Google Flight is an average travel search engine. VS.

Focus Group  Conducted a test with 4 people individually.  Asked questions and gave tasks.  Observed their screens.  Asked the participants to speak out loud what they were thinking.

Questions  Asked around 10 questions  For example:  Before: What do you expect when using a travel search engine?  Task: Find the quickest, nonstop, and first class ticket from Boston to London.  After: How did you feel about this travel search engine?

Focus Group Results  Participants:  Expect a simple and quick search engine that finds them their desired flight ticket.  Want to see prices that compare different airlines to find tickets with the best value.  Thought the duration scrubber, under the More tab, was inconvenient.  Took some time to figure out how to purchase their flight tickets.  Overall, they liked the site because it was simple.  Would use the site again to purchase flight tickets.  Some preferred to other flight search engines.

Heuristic Evaluation  Advantages:  General rules that can be applied any website to see how well the user interface is made.  Quick way to evaluation a website.  A good way to find potential errors.  Disadvantage:  Multiple evaluations should be applied.  Must fully understand the evaluations to apply the heuristics effectively.

Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design  "the king of usability" (Internet Magazine) "the guru of Web page usability" (The New York Times)  All the words are easily understood. Programming or complex words are not used (Match between system and the real world).  Not a clear way to exit from features (tabs, calendar) (User control and freedom).  No help service (Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors).

Site Map Homepage Outbound Page Return PagePurchase Page

Purchase ticket

Itinerary + Cost Credit Card Information

More Time

Potential Change Shortest Duration

What I learned  During a focus group, having the participants talking out loud what they are thinking is very helpful.  Heuristic Evaluation.  Even sites from big name companies can be improved.

Questions and Answers?

Sources Used    evaluation.html