ReserveAmerica

Introduction

ReserveAmerica is a booking website where users can reserve campsites for their next camping excursion. The company boasts itself as the largest provider of campsite reservations in North America with millions of transactions every year.

This project is a concept redesign of the ReserveAmerica Website.

Goals

The goal of this project is to evaluate the current usability of the ReserveAmerica website, and conduct a visual redesign the site with improved usability in mind.

Roles

UX Research, Strategy, UI Design

Platform

Web

Tools

Sketch, InVision, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Google Docs/Sheets, Xtensio

Here is the homepage from the final redesign:

Jump to the prototype

Research Goals

To aid in the evaluation of the website's usability, it helps to first establish some research goals to better frame the problem and its potential solutions.

1.
Identify the user

Knowing who the user is provides context to motivations and needs.

2.
Find Pain Points

Knowing where users struggle will point out where the usability issues are.

3.
Evaluate Usability

Understanding where the website currently falls short reveals where changes need to be made.

Heuristic Evaluation

The first step is to gauge the current usability of the website by conducting a heuristic evaluation. I used the LEMErS rubric as a skeleton for the evaluation. LEMErS refers to the:

Learnability, Efficiency, Memorability, Error Management, and Satisfaction of the website.

User Persona

Using the results from the research above, the following user persona was created.

Nathan Hopper

26 Years Old
Student
Los Angeles, CA
Intermediate Camper - Goes once or twice a year

Nathan and his friends are planning a trip to Joshua Tree in May and Nathan has been tasked with making the reservation.

Frustrations

Inefficiency: Nathan does not want to jump through many hoops just to book a campsite
Clutter: He currently has to filter through search results just to find the relevant information he needs to book a campsite.

Competitive and Comparative Analysis

Since ReserveAmerica is the only website that can be used for some campground/campsite reservations, there isn't much variety in the direct competitions. Because of this, my competitive and comparative analysis looked at analagous websites, such as Airbnb and Hipcamp.

The most important factors to consider were user flow, feature visibility, and UI design.

Key Points:

ReserveAmerica has a fragmented reservation process which sends users to a third-party website to complete the transaction.

We looked at the features for Airbnb, Hipcamp, and other booking websites such as Hotels.com and Kayak.

Research Takeaways:

Some of the most pertinent information obtained from the research was as follows:

The lack of a clear flow contributes to a majority of a user's frustrations.
Adding flexibility to how a user moves through the website may sound like users will have an easier time, but in actuality increase cognitive load and add confusion.
Making sure there is a clear visual path for users will increase usability and improve the user's experience.