Heuristic Evaluation of Bookme.com Website

This report presents a heuristic evaluation of the Bookme.com website, focusing on its usability and adherence to heuristic principles. The evaluation identifies areas where the website performs well and areas where improvements are needed. Recommendations for redesigning the website and improving navigation, consistency, and documentation are provided.

User-Centered System Design & Evaluation
Assignment 2
ABSTRACT
The usability concept has been an important part
during designing an interactive system. The heuristics
evaluation has been conducted over Bookme.com
website that shows that there has been some
principles of evaluation followed while some of them
are not followed. There are some recommendations
provided for improving some parts on the website.
Author Keywords
Think-aloud, further education, usability evaluation
and interface evaluation
ACM Classification Keywords
Information interfaces and presentation: User
Interfaces – Evaluation/methodology, Interaction
styles, Screen design, User-centered design;
1. INTRODUCTION
Bookme.com is a travel and tourism website that was
founded in 2014. Bookme website has been helping
in booking and providing tourism packages at
different places. It has been an open platform for the
tourists to travel throughout various places. This
website has been user friendly and users can book
hotels from this website. This report has focused on
the evaluation of the website by heuristic principles.
2. BACKGROUND
Online tour and travel industry has been facilitating
in the market in recent years. Therefore, there has
been various competitors in the market in this
industry. Bookme.com has started its journey in 2014
and has been successful till date (Hearst, Laskowski
and Silva 2016). It has able to dignify the tourism
industry by providing exciting package deals with
lodging and food included. Therefore, on the
perspective of usability, this website has been helping
in providing a proper performance on the tourism
industry.
3. LITERATURE REVIEW
The usability factor can be defined as involvement of
different important concepts related to each other.
Therefore, there have been consecutive approaches in
the dependent variable of the usability factor. As per
the rules of ISO 9421-11, the standard definition of
usability can be as follows, Usability has been
effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction factor with
specified users provided with proper goals in
environment (Paz et al. 2015). There have been
various contradictory views with usability among the
authors of various HCI literature. Therefore, the
usability factor has been depended on how easily a
user can navigate throughout the website.
There have been various methods that can be used for
evaluating the website. The user feedback has been
one of the important method by which evaluation can
be done.
4. EVALUATION METHODOLOGY
4.1 Selection of usability evaluation method
The usability evaluation method (UEM) has been
selected for this website has been heuristic evaluation
(Schnall et al. 2016). This has been selected as this
evaluation methodology has been popular and simple
to use. It helps in critical analyze and verify various
stages of the website.
4.2 Evaluation design
The evaluation design has been based on the
following aspects:
• Initially list of ten heuristics has been recommended
by Neilsen is identified for evaluation.
• Several Questionnaires are designed for
participants. 8 participants have been invited from
computer and information background and were
asked for providing their response for those
questionnaires.
5. EVALUATION RESULT
Principle 1: Visibility of System Status
During this evaluation under this principle,
Bookme.com has been well performed and designed.
Users are informed with proper destinations and

hotels along with their prices listed on the website
(Kölling and McKay 2016). Therefore, it becomes easy
for tourists to choose their hotels and places as per
their budget.
Principle 2: Match between System and Real
World
This principle has not been well defined in the
website. The hotels and destinations provided in the
website have not been totally verified that have
caused problems to various tourists who have booked
from this website, therefore, this website has not
matched with the system and real world (Balatsoukas
et al. 2015).
Principle 3: User control and freedom
This principle has not been followed in the website.
Page navigation has not been properly done with
various links provided in the website (Ivanova,
Lambrix and Åberg 2015). After clicking on different
links, there is no navigation of pages and same page
reappears. Therefore, the functionality of the website
has been very poor.
Principle 4: Consistency and Standards
This principle has been not followed in the
Bookme.com website. Navigation history has not
retained in the website after the login (Silva, Holden
and Jordan 2015). This have been creating
inconsistency in the interaction. The page navigation
has been a major issue in this website.
Principle 5: Error Prevention
This principle has not been followed in the website.
The hotels and destinations have not been verified by
the website. Therefore, customers are not sure about
the reliability of their tour. There are various errors in
the page navigation of the website.
Principle 6: Recognition rather than recall
When user need to books a hotel, users have to create
an account on the website. There is a requirement of
signup after that and again problems arises in the
recognition of the user at first instance (Toribio-
Guzmán et al. 2016). Therefore, this principle has not
been followed in the website.
Principle 7: Flexibility and efficiency of use
The website has been flexible during booking hotels.
Users do not have to worry about their bookings as
there are various hotels connected with the website.
Principle 8: Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
This principle has not been followed in the website.
The website has not evolved with times. The
company has left the same website till now.
Therefore, it has failed in this principle.
Principle 9: Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and
Recover From Errors
When a booking is done, it needs to be under several
regulation and guidelines. Therefore, this website
has been able to maintain all those regulation and
guidelines (Myers and Stylos 2016). They also provide
services to help users during booking a room in
hotels from their website. Therefore, this website has
able to follow this principle.
Principle 10: Help and Documentation
The website has been helping various customers for
enjoying their holidays in beautiful destinations and
hotels. The price of the hotels have been kept
affordable for attracting customers (Ivanova, Lambrix
and Åberg 2015). All bookings have been documented
properly that create trust among customers.
Customers can also provide feedbacks to the website
about their services provided to them.
6. RECOMMENDATION
During evaluation it has been seen that some of
principles have been followed properly and some of
them are not followed.
 It is recommended that the website needs to
be redesigned properly.
 The page navigation of the website needs to
be improved.
 Consistency and standard of the website
needs to be improved.
 The history of navigation needs to be
retained in the website.
 Proper documentation of the bookings of the
customers need to be done properly.
 The verification of hotels on the website
needs to be improved. The user interface
design of the website need to be enhanced
properly for attracting customers.

Figure 1: Home page
Figure 2: Hotel booking page

Figure 3: Flights booking page
Figure 4: Car rental booking page

Figure 5: Cruises booking page

Figure 6: Flight and hotel booking page
Figure 7: Flight, Hotel and Car booking page
7. CONCLUSION
It can be concluded that Bookme.com has been
working in order to book hotels and destination for
tourists. However, the evaluation of the website has
been slightly on negative point. The page navigation
has been the main problem reflected in the
evaluation. Therefore, the page navigation needs to
be redesigned properly.
8. REFERENCES
Balatsoukas, P., Williams, R., Davies, C., Ainsworth,
J. and Buchan, I., 2015. User interface requirements
for web-based integrated care pathways: evidence
from the evaluation of an online care pathway
investigation tool. Journal of medical
systems, 39(11), p.183.
Hearst, M.A., Laskowski, P. and Silva, L., 2016,
May. Evaluating information visualization via the
interplay of heuristic evaluation and question-based
scoring. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference
on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 5028-
5033). ACM.
Ivanova, V., Lambrix, P. and Åberg, J., 2015, May.
Requirements for and evaluation of user support for
large-scale ontology alignment. In European
Semantic Web Conference (pp. 3-20). Springer,
Cham.
Kölling, M. and McKay, F., 2016. Heuristic
evaluation for novice programming systems. ACM
Transactions on Computing Education
(TOCE), 16(3), p.12.
Lilholt, P.H., Jensen, M.H. and Hejlesen, O.K., 2015.
Heuristic evaluation of a telehealth system from the
Danish TeleCare North Trial. International journal
of medical informatics, 84(5), pp.319-326.
Myers, B.A. and Stylos, J., 2016. Improving API
usability. Communications of the ACM, 59(6), pp.62-
69.
Paz, F., Paz, F.A., Villanueva, D. and Pow-Sang,
J.A., 2015, April. Heuristic evaluation as a
complement to usability testing: a case study in web
domain. In 2015 12th International Conference on
Information Technology-New Generations
(ITNG) (pp. 546-551). IEEE.
Schnall, R., Rojas, M., Bakken, S., Brown III, W.,
Carballo-Dieguez, A., Carry, M., Gelaude, D.,
Mosley, J.P. and Travers, J., 2016. A user-centered
model for designing consumer mobile health
(mHealth) applications (apps). Journal of biomedical
informatics, 60, pp.243-251.
Silva, P.A., Holden, K. and Jordan, P., 2015, January.
Towards a list of heuristics to evaluate smartphone
apps targeted at older adults: a study with apps that
aim at promoting health and well-being. In System

Sciences (HICSS), 2015 48th Hawaii International
Conference on (pp. 3237-3246). IEEE.
Toribio-Guzmán, J.M., García-Holgado, A., Pérez,
F.S., García-Peñalvo, F.J. and Martín, M.A.F., 2016,
September. Study of the Usability of the Private
Social Network SocialNet using Heuristic
Evaluation. In Proceedings of the XVII International
Conference on Human Computer Interaction (p. 22).
ACM.

Appendix:
Risk assessment:
Domain Impact of risk
1. Random sequence generation
(selection bias) Low
2. Allocation concealment
(selection bias) High
3. Blinding of participants and personnel
(performance bias) Low
4. Blinding of outcome assessment
(detection bias) Not clear
5. Incomplete outcome data
(attrition bias) High
6. Selective outcome reporting?
(reporting bias) Low
7. Other bias Low

Data collection form
Review title
Usability evaluation review of YouTube
Study ID
General Information
Date form completed 11/01/2019
Report title Heuristic evaluation of Bookme.com website
Instruction to the participants:
 Review each of the features with reference to 10 principles of heuristic evaluation
 Rating should be given after completing the review
 Whether to 1 or 5 stars it completely depends on the participants

 5 stars implies no improvement is needed as the principle of the evaluation has been
followed properly. Any rating less than 5 star means improvement is required to comply
with the principle
Problem found
(write a single
problem in the
space)
Heuristic(
s) violated
Where it was violated
How was it
found
Severit
y
Rating
Task
Locatio
n
Navigating
the website
Scanning for
problems
Understandin
g the content
Systematicall
y searching
for problems
Searching
Trying to
force errors
Entering data
Following
users task
Navigating
the website
Scanning for
problems
Understandin
g the content
Systematicall
y searching
for problems
Searching Trying to
force errors

Entering data
Following
users task
Navigating
the website
Scanning for
problems
Understandin
g the content
Systematicall
y searching
for problems
Searching
Trying to
force errors
Entering data
Following
users task
Result:
Problem found
(write a single
problem in the
space)
Heuristic(
s) violated
Where it was violated
How was it
found
Severit
y
Rating
Task
Locatio
n
The labels
assigned for
Username and
password is not
retained when
Recogniti
on rather
than
recall
Navigating
the website
sign in
page
Scanning for
problems
2
Understandi
ng the
content
Systematical
ly searching
for problems

typing is started
Searching
Trying to
force errors
Entering data
Following
users task
Inconsistency in
project activities
Alignment of the
project, projects
are not categorized
and inconsistent
projects activity
section in the
website
Consisten
cy and
Standards.
Help
Efficiency
Navigating
the website
Activity
page of
the
website
Scanning for
problems
3
Understandi
ng the
content
Systematical
ly searching
for problems
Searching
Trying to
force errors
Entering data
Following
users task
Search option is
not consistent
Efficiency
Visibility
of System
Status
Navigating
the website
Searchin
g page
of the
website
Scanning for
problems
2
Understandi
ng the
content
Systematical
ly searching
for problems
Searching Trying to

Flexibility
of use
force errors
Entering data
Following
users task
Problem found
(write a single
problem in the
space)
Heuristic(s
) violated
Where it was violated
How was it
found
Severit
y
Rating
Task
Locatio
n
Uploading project
is not effective
Error
Prevention
Recognitio
n
Flexibility
and
efficiency
of use
Navigating
the website
Project
uploadin
g page
Scanning for
problems
4
Understandin
g the content
Systematicall
y searching
for problems
Searching
Trying to
force errors
Entering data Following
users task

Viewing of
project is not
proper
Flexibility
and
efficiency
of use
Help
Navigating
the website
Project
viewing
page
Scanning for
problems
3
Understandin
g the content
Systematicall
y searching
for problems
Searching
Trying to
force errors
Entering data
Following
users task
replying to
comment is not
consistent
Visibility
of system
status
Flexibility
and
efficiency
of use
Navigating
the website
Comme
nt page
of the
website
Scanning for
problems
3
Understandin
g the content
Systematicall
y searching
for problems
Searching
Trying to
force errors
Entering data
Following
users task