Upon landing in Kuala Lumpur, my French friends who just came back from Cambodia are looking for a place to unpack their luggage and quick rest. They wanted some place near the heart of the city. With their budget and location preferences in mind, I decided to bring them over to Tune Hotels. Furthermore, I’ve always wanted to see how the “Booking” system works in Asia’s 1st No Frill Hotel.
Upon reaching the nearest computer terminal en route Tune Hotels, which “co-incidentally” happened to be my office, I finally got the chance to look at how the whole booking process works. The entire booking process is performed “live” by my friends. Bear in mind that this “live performance” is purely executed from the point of a non-English speaking user.
Bigger input fields and making the Booking Now stood out prominently can mean a lot of difference. The rule is simple, important element should always stand out visually from the rest. In this case, it’s not the Login button.
Most visitors jump into the form without spending much time browsing the entire website. Obviously, the main conversion of the website is online booking, hence creating other pages such as “About Us”, “Corporate Information” and various hotel guest-unrelated information would be counter-productive. Instead, content that is important is build alongside the form structure. Notice in this example above, it would be difficult to explain in text how comfortable the mattress it. A picture speaks a thousand words.
However, after my friend finish filling up all the booking details, as he was proceeding to the credit card payment phase, he was annoyingly greeted with an obstrusive “Member Sign Up” form. This part of the process was not executed as elegantly as I expected. As a rule of thumb, never add unnecessary processes in between the starting point and the goal- always use the Shortest Path Algorithm.
You can always include the “Member Sign Up” phase in the confirmation e-mail later, which in my opinion is much more relevant. And one can’t help but feel that the UI designer decided to take the easy way out by putting 5 equally prominent red bullets for the “Login”, “Register”, “Email me my password”, and “Back”. Hard work doesn’t always pay off now, but laziness almost always pay off instantly. The user could have been guided better and faster with a better layout design.
Lost in translation! Yup, Tune Hotels lost RM 5 just because some of the items listed in the website is not easily understood and was easily pass over by my friend. The word ‘Towel’ which is written only in English proves to be a headache for my friends who could have mistaken it as sanitary napkins. An icon would have done the job much better!
Sometimes it’s the minor stuffs tat bugged us tat makes us remember it, and tat sometimes overshadows the other brilliant aspects and beautiful ideas. Would be nice to see these few pointed out being at least taken into little account.
A Tune Hotels’ Blog can get this job done well too, collecting feedback and experience of their hotel guests!
Agreed with “A picture speaks a thousand words” although we don’t encourage too much graphic in a website but placing them necessarily is an added point.
Keep up the good work.