A quick study into what goes on in users’ heads when they open up a travel website has thrown up some interesting results.
The study is from Netherlands-based web usability firm Usabilla – a specialist in providing visual feedback to companies on how their sites perform.
Usabilla based the research on hotel, airline and what it terms, price comparison sites, asking participants what they liked and what they would remove?
The Facebook ‘like’ button was widely disliked across almost all sites involved in the study with respondents finding it silly and questioning how liking a company on the social network would help them.
For most brands, including British Airways, easytobook, Travelocity and Expedia, consumers provided negative feedback on the Facebook thumbs up button.
The only exception was within the hotel sector where brands such as Hyatt used the Facebook widget to show how many fans it has and participants felt this instilled trust.
The other element of homepages that consistently received negative feedback was promotions and best offers advertisements.
Respondents felt they were distracting and did not want to click for a better deal when that was why they had visited the site in the first place.
On this element, Priceline, which received positive feedback for the innovative bidding elements of the site, and Expedia, were the only exceptions.
How deals were displayed made a difference for Expedia with 42% of respondents saying the deals and offers button was a strength but 38% said they did not like the Groupon Getaways or the association with the flash sales provider.
In addition, 51% did not like the use of internal ads on the far right on the site.
Other key findings:
- Hotels – clean sites with a strong logo and easy navigation deemed more trustworthy and attractive. Easy to find contact numbers, affiliation with sister brands and geographic locations also reassuring. Social media such as Hilton’s follow-us on Twitter widget and Hyatt’s Youtube link also popular.
- Airlines – prices displayed with asterisks made respondents feel they were being tricked. Weather updates and other useful information suggested as a replacement to airline’s own promotional ads.
- Price Comparison – search boxes were popular overall as were characters such as Travelocity’s gnome although Priceline’s William Shatner received mixed feedback – liked by 30% , disliked by 23%. Inspirational elements deemed to provide additional value.
The study involved 800 participants and 18 travel websites.
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Some interesting eye tracking gaze images there which once again show that travel companies need to make their minds up whether they want people going through the search cannonball or into their merchandising promos. Both the above suggest a dilution of traffic after the homepage and also lacking a task based approach. A large proportion of travel customers are looking to compare prices when they hit your website, the best way to let them do this is funnel them into the cannonball and booking path, surface your merchandising during the journey where it’s relevant and appropriate. That’s my tuppence worth…
Just a correction on Steve’s comment, Usabilla does not offer any eye tracking services but contextualized feedback on images, mock-ups, wireframes and websites. The heat-maps are generated by users’ clicks and notes, while the report is mostly based on users’ feedback.
Thanks for clarifying Loucas! Had assumed those were gaze patterns.
Interesting. “search boxes were popular overall as were characters such as Travelocity’s gnome although Priceline’s William Shatner received mixed feedback”
Is there any feedback/data to learn whether travellers generally prefer to type or click options when browsing?
Shatner will take 30%…
Thanks Sam – the research was based on asking users what the liked and what they would like removed – hence the hotspots – specific reference to preferences to click or type is not made.
“The Facebook ‘like’ button was widely disliked across almost all sites involved in the study with respondents finding it silly and questioning how liking a company on the social network would help them.” – Ops I have just added this to our web site. I can see the logic of the number of Fans installing trusts. I have actually hidden this as I had assumed it was irrelevant.
Great info, nice reporting @FoxyChops.
This comes as no surprise. I am so glad our industry is moving past giddy groupthink and starting to ask whether Facebook means anything.
It doesn’t. It’s closed, so it’s meaningless. Let’s move back to the open net where interaction and content actually matter. Cheers all!