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Describe what a day in the life of your intended user is like today.Rav is a small business owner, who has clients all over the United States. Being a small business owner, he looks at cutting costs wherever he can, especially travel; since he has to travel a lot. His wife and kids want to travel with him this time, so he also has to look for a hotel. He is a person who does all his work on the go and so he goes online on his phone to look for cheapest flights that he can find. He searches for flights and the top result that comes up is Kayak.com. As he navigates to its website, it suggests him to use the Kayak app instead of the website. As he tries to search for flights on the application, he enters the source and destination and then tries to press the button ‘Find Flights’. He is successful in doing this but only after multiple failed attempts at pressing all these buttons and entering the info - owing to the big size of his hands and the small screen of his phone. He also faces difficulty in increasing the number of people travelling. His patience is running out as he wanted a quick quote of the price so he could search on other websites also. He is also confused and wants to ask some questions, but he cannot find any help button or customer support contact.

What problems are you addressing ?

► Difficulty in pressing the buttons (e.g ‘Find Flights’, ‘Find Hotels’)

► Difficulty in increasing the number of people requesting the services (e.g number of people travelling or staying at the hotel).

► No quick quotes for services requested (e.g prices of flights or hotel rooms).

► No support or help button or contact provided on main screen.

ImprovementsFig.1- Size increase – We have increased the size of the main button ie. “Find hotels”,” Find Cars”, and “Find Flights” to increase the ease of access to the buttons for all users but especially those users with vision impairments and motor function issues.

Fig.2- Button changes- In the passenger & Cabin screen, George A. Miller’s magic number 7, was violated as the options on the screen exceeded 9. We reduced the options on the screen to 7, including a drop down menu which presents the options to choose the seat class you wish to purchase.

Fig.3- Advertisements – The ads in case of hotels and cars were at the top of the screen. We pushed them down so that they don’t stand out and disturb the user experience

Fig.4- Big Data- In one screenshot we can see a lot of destinations crammed into one screen which causes a lot of confusion. We couldn’t implement it but want that clutter to decrease. Go to big data screen

Fig.5- Calendar Rate- We added the rates to the calendar just as we can see in google flights i.e. The calendar screen

Fig.6- Customer Support – There was no screen showing customer support so we added a screen by the name that provides customer support services.

Future ScopeThere is a lot that can still be changed which were not in the scope of this prototype. The first point is putting a button to choose between multiple Languages. Another important thing we noted was the role of big data. When the app makes use of big data, it clutters the whole screen with pinned locations and the prices. This can be made better using a better prototyping tool.

Citations►Rogers, Y., Sharp, H., & Preece, J. (2011). Interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction. San Francisco, Ca: Wiley Publishing Inc.►http://colinpurrington.com/tips/academic/posterdesign

ConclusionIn conclusion we took a look at the website for Kayak, it had very little we could do or improve so we checked out the mobile app for the same. What we saw was that there was scope for improvement in the button department.

► Improved the important buttons and made the app faster► Added costs in the about the flight in the calendar itself

► Taking advertisements and disguising them in between the data

There was much that we wanted to do but the scope of the prototyping application prohibited us in doing so.

Kayak : IOS Mobile App RedesignedArshpreet S Bhatti, Alejandro Haro, Gunveet Singh Arora

San Jose State University, California

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