Hotel booking process design & usability

9.1.1.2 Sites used in the usability test 
TABLE 15: Websites evaluated in the usability test 
Site name 
URL 
Style 
Opodo http://www.opodo.co.uk
Style A
(See section 5.1.1)
Expedia http://www.expedia.co.uk
Style B
(See section 5.1.2)
Wotif http://www.wotif.com
Style C
(See section 6.1.1)
Downtown Disney http://www.downtowndisneyhotels.com
Style D - Single screen
(See section 6.2.2)
Source: Travel UCD Research, January 2003
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Hotel booking process design & usability 
Travel UCD – February 2003 
9.1.1.3 Task failures occurring in the usability test 
Every task failure made by a user during a usability test is an opportunity to learn more about the
design.
For this evaluation, we recorded task failures that fell into the following category:
• Unable to answer the question set as the task
If the user created a budget, but used an incorrect set of dates (such as for the date of the test
rather than the date for the proposed trip), this was not counted as task failure.
TABLE 16: Task failure, by site 
Site name 
Task #1 
Create budget 
Task #2 
Locate specific 
hotel and rate 
Wotif 7
(combined)
Downtown Disney
7 (combined)
Opodo 1
5
Expedia 0
0
Source: Travel UCD Research, January 2003
Each of the four sites was visited 12 times, so the maximum score could be 12 errors (maximum
one error per task). For Wotif and Downtown Disney, the scores between the two tasks have
been combined. Once the user had failed the first task on either of these sites, they were in no
position to answer the second task without any explanation of how the website worked.