Problem Statement
Team Management Structure
Competitive Analysis
Methods

Personas and Goals
  Evan: Business Traveler
  Savanah: Leisure Traveler
  Charley: Adventure Traveler

Scenarios
  Evan: Buys a Guide
  Savanah: Starts a Guide
  Charley: Edits a Guide

Initial Design Ideas
  Ella v 1.0
  Billie v 1.0

Low-fidelity Prototype
  Evaluation:
  Methods & Measures
  Results & Discussion

First Interactive Prototype
  Revised Design
  Prototype Overview
  Storyboards
  Evaluation Instructions
  Midterm presentation (PPT)

Second Interactive Prototype

Usability Test
  Results
  Discussion
  Formal Experiment Design

Final Report
  Storyboard
  Final presentation (ppt)

Task Matrix
Travelite Vocabulary
Participation Matrix

Heuristic Evaluation
(Reading Tree Prototype)

Appendices

Sacha Pearson
Kim Garrett
Jennifer English

Contact Travelite

For our competitive analysis we chose to examine most of the major travel information publishers that also make their information available online, along with Zagats and Booktailor.com. While there is currently no one doing exactly what TraveLite proposes, each of these "competitors" offers some aspect of the TraveLite service, including searchable/browsable information online, customization, or making the information accessible to a PDA. We reviewed the following sites/services:

Fodor's
Rough Guides
Zagats
Booktailor.com
Travelocity miniguides
Frommers

Fodor's [www.fodors.com]:

Fodor's teases the User by offering the opportunity to create a miniguide, however there is no method to keep the guide, except by printing each page as you go. They do offer extensive information and allow you to search by destination, as well as on categories such as restaurants and hotels. You can customize, or refine, results in each category. For example, San Francisco has shopping, restaurants, hotels, nightlife and the arts, sights and activities, travel tips that can be customized. Under restaurants you can further refine resuts by several metadata types, price, location, cuisine. This takes you to a page of detailed options.

This is a good service in that you can search and refine results, unfortunately you are not able to 'capture' the results of this unless you print each section as you complete it.

Ideas for Design:
-Structure of refine choice
-Metadata structure and heading types
-Presentation of information.

 

Rough Guides [travel.roughguides.com]

The Rough Guides are competitive in that they offer their content online but otherwise they do not offer much in terms of convenience nor ease of finding information.

Although Rough Guides offers all their content online, they've unfortunately simply taken it from the book and adopted a similar hierarchical table of contents. This means that the user has to move down their hierarchy in order to access information. Although you can move around in this hierarchy, you still have to drill down under each individual heading.

For example, in trying to find the Greens Restaurant, I had to drill down through Eating, Restaurants, Downtown, Vegetarian. This takes too many steps (not to mention being inaccurate information, neither Raw nor Greens are in the Downtown area).

Furthermore, the categories provided by them do not map to common terms or understandable categories, for example 24-hour eating.

Ideas for Design:
- Use understandable and commonly used terms
-Group content under correct and easy to comprehend categories
-Do not establish an excessively deep hierarchy.

Zagats.com [ www.zagats.com]
Zagats.com is a well-known restaurant guide covering most major cities and urban areas. The online version of Zagat's essentially mirrors the content of the printed guides, while also taking advantage of the electronic medium. Zagats has implemented search in a variety of ways, and also enabled different means of browsing their content. Zagats content is organized geographically at the first level (screenshot in new window), requiring a user to first specify a city or urban area. Once a location is selected, a variety of search and browse options (screenshot in new window) are available: by search by name and by attribute, browse by neighborhood, cuisine, or alphabetically, or browse "recommended" lists. Search results are sortable by a variety of attributes (screenshot in new window) (alphabetically, by price, by rating, by noise level, etc.), and the user is provided with an opportunity to refine the query, which returns to the user to the search screen with previously submitted criteria in place and editable.

Individual restaurant pages (screenshot in new window) contain a review, lists "features" a restaurant meets (outdoor dining, good for groups, etc.), along with its detailed characteristics (food rating, service rating, noise level, price range, etc.). At the level of an individual restaurant page, an editable "more like this" search option is provided, permitting the user to submit a "found" restaurant as a query.

Zagats sells a PDA version of their service on CD-rom, which requires the user to purchase an upgrade each year when the guide is updated. Zagats content is also available through Vindigo's PDA city guides.

Ideas for design
- nice means of search, most importantly, lots of different ways into the information
- extensive use of attributes in search
- "more like this" option is interesting

 

Booktailor.com [www.booktailor.com]
Booktailor is the closest thing to TraveLite currently available. Booktailor.com is a UK-based travel information aggregator that has contracts with many of the major travel publishers to sell their content. Booktailor currently only offers customized guides in print, as spiral bound books, with no search or browse abilities, no preview of content (forcing the user to rely on her prior knowledge of the publisher or source), and no detailed selection of content (content is chunked at a very high level).

The structure of the Booktailor task path is nicely done. The site walks the user through the multi-step building process with helpful instructions. First, personalize a guide with a title and cover color. Next, choose one or more destinations. (Currently Booktailor offers about 30 destinations, such as Italy or Tuscany, cities such as New York City, or Best Thai Beaches.)

Next, the user selects the content categories desired (screenshot in new window), ranging from dining to history to shopping. For each content category chosen, Booktailor lists the articles and book excerpts (screenshot in new window), allowing the user to remove unwanted selections. As a result of the "chunking" of the content, it is likely there is overlap in the content provided by the various publishers.

At the end, Booktailor displays the table of contents for the guide (screenshot in new window), including the estimated page count and final price (in British pounds). The finished book is spiral bound. The site makes ordering simple, following most e-commerce best practices.

Booktailor also enables a "my books" section, which is populated with a list of the guides in progress and recently purchased guides. However, there is no explict way to save a guide (it appears they use some kind of session management), and it is unclear a user would know to check "my books" for her "saved" guides.

Ideas for design
- incorporate/improve upon the task path for building a guide
- look at the "my books" section for ideas re: guide/account management

 

Travelocity miniguides [dest.travelocity.com]

Travelocity provides custom miniguides available in HTML. The content is provided exclusively by Frommers. Each guide is destination-specific; multi-destination guides are not available. The miniguide is created in three steps: 1. choose your destination (screenshot in new window), 2. select the categories for your miniguide (screenshot in new window), 3. refine in each category (screen shot in new window). Content is "chunked" at a very high level (mirroring Frommer's book structure and nomenclature) with no preview of the categories or their contents, no search options, and no metadata provided. The final guide is available in the form of a long static HTML page (screenshot in new window) which the user can print out or save to disk. The guide cannot be saved online, nor is further refinement of the HTML guide possible once produced - the user has to start over from the beginning if a change is desired.

Frommers.com [www.frommers.com]

The section of the site of primary concern is "Destinations." This section might be (it's hard to tell) a complete offering of the content in their guides. Of interest are the navigation scheme and the method of choosing destinations.

The navigation into destinations does not allow the user to narrow their search.

It looks as though one might choose USA, then be able to narrow down to a region or state, narrow down to a city, etc. Once the user clicks on one of these menu items, they are whisked away to that destination's page. To move to a higher level in the hierarchy, the user can click on the map provided below the list boxes.

Once the destination is chosen, a high level table if contents (screen shot in new window) and information in very small chunks (presumably to prevent users from constructing guides by printing web pages) are presented. Clicking Complete Table of Contents expands all the high level categories with their subcategories in the main window. Clicking on a subcategory in this hierarchy moves that content into the main window and collapses the rest of the hierarchy in the navigation bar, leaving the subcategories for the content of interest expanded (screen shot in new window).

Accomodations, restaurants, shopping and nightlife are all searchable. The accommodations are searchable by neighborhood and price range and are offered in an index form as well, sortable by neighborhood, price range and name. Restaurants are searchable by price category, neighborhood and cuisine.

There is no facility for buying content online, only the ability to purchase books published by Frommer's. In a sense, the site offers users the book browsing experience they would have at the bookstore.

Ideas for design
-look at how the information is chunked and organized into hierarchies
-look at the how the content of the hierarchies changes as users drill down
-do not implement choosing a destination as Frommer's does