Redesigning the
website of Alibaba.ir

Project Overview
Alibaba.ir is the largest online travel agency (OTA) in Iran. With more than 10 million users, they are the dominant player in all travel related services in the country. Alibaba sells International and Domestic Flight, Train, and Bus tickets along with accommodations and travel services like Tours, Insurance, Car rental, etc in Iran. It is one of the biggest players in the Iranian Startup scene.
My Role
When I joined Alibaba.ir in 2018, the website interface was indeed old-fashioned and the 70 % of our users were using website platform. This is how we redesigned that and I lunched UX laboratory to evaluate the new version of the design.
WE started out the research by conducting a Focus Group Test and Usability Testing to find out what are the main problems and current issues for booking a domestic ticket on Alibaba.ir.  Survey, Monitoring user behavior through a defined funnel, A question list, Call interviews and writing down users feedback about the product in general.
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‍Here is the list of questions:
‍what's the purpose of your traveling?
What's the first thing you do when you want go to travel?
How many times do you travel in a year?
Do you travel for business or other purposes?
On which website do you search for tickets?
What's the benefit of booking online instead of physically buying?
What bothers you during this process?
Do you have any suggestions for improving the website?

Who we invented to the office?
14 users from a targeted group selected from behaviour variations (price-sensitive, quality oriented, planner, random purchaser and etc) which we had their data already, were asked to come over and do the on-sight product test and an interview.
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Knowing the Persona
‍After the exploration part and searching about the target user behaviors, it was time to shape all the information we collected during the interviews. We build a representative user, which tells us about a group of users, with the same behaviours. This effective tool to define the user's descriptive model.
User Research

Pains & Gains:

Pains:
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User spends too much time searching the internet for the best offer and it is overwhelming.
Duplicate entries make them board.
User need to compare prices between different airlines to find the best price.
Filtering the time is very important for them.
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Gains:
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Traveling with people and hang out with a group is always fun and exciting and gives you new experience.
Offers and deals based on user's taste could save him so much time and engage the user more.
With a loyalty discount user feels that each ticket he buys is valuable for the future purchases.
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Some of our solutions

But our duty is not finished :)

When the UI design phase was finished we conducted a usability test whose owner was me!

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Purposes:

We categorized the most significant flow of Alibaba.ir into blow list because most of the processes in all services are similar. Additionally, We evaluated domestic flights since the it has the most revenue for the company.

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Search

Listing

Registration

Details of Form

Payment

Refund

  • How users will interacted with the new design.
  • Is new flow usable?
  • Are one way and Two way domestic flights clear?
  • Is accessibility to profile easy?
  • How easy is calling to customer support service?
  • Are Sign in and sign up process  friendly?
  • Is editing the entries accessible?
  • How they add other more members?
  • How they use their saved information during the process.
  • What would they do if want to refund a ticket?
  • How filters are useful?

You can see one the of mobile tests through this link

You can see one the of desktop tests through this link

These are some of the problems & solutions.

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Problem: When users use back, their entries is not saved.

Solutions: We fixed it by helping development team.

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Problem: Users tend to click on the whole inputs but just icons are clickable.

Solutions: We fixed it by helping development team.

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Problem: Users have to type whole letters of a city name to choose it in search box.

Solutions: We fixed it by helping development team.

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Problem: When users are scrolling the listing page, filters are scrolling too.

Solutions: We fixed it by helping development team.

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Problem: During completing the details of information, users can not remove a member.

Solutions: We added remove function to each card.

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Problem: Adding from passenger list is not as clear as could be.

Solutions: It was an outline component, so we changed it to a fill button.

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Problem: Based on input (Persian or English) they had to change keyboard.

Solutions: We fixed it by helping development team.

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Problem: Refund is not clear. 70 percent of users didn't find it.

Solutions: In their profile we changed the ticket place.

Conclusion

The goal of this project was improving its user interface in accordance with new trends, reducing the number of calls in customers support department, however during this process by using UX tools and design thinking method we improved its usability. All this process helped us create a meaningful product for our users, which resolves pains during the travel experience and helps them to achieve their goals. As a team, we realized the importance of developing a product with a user centered approach. We also learned the power of testing ideas in the first stages of the process, to validate our product before the development. Today I am pleased to say I launched UX laboratory in Alibaba company which is stile alive in the process of design in this team. On the other hand, I realized the role of user interface in in improving a usable product.

Want to work together?

If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!

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