As of yesterday, we have completed our interviews and surveys. As we’ve classified responses according to need and feature request, we’ve noticed some interesting things. While we expected people to be eager to be able to have customers book directly from the destination website, quite a few people expressed that this wasn’t interesting or feasible for them. Many of the local business owners we spoke to were actually not set up to do online payments yet, and instead had customers pay in-person or via invoices. Others already had many platforms they had to keep information up-to-date on, and keep track of bookings from - popular websites like Hotels.com - and as a result, they weren’t interested in expanding to yet another website to maintain. With this in mind, we have decided that this is not something we will try to implement, and while we will try to provide our collaborator with some information about setting up booking platforms for future consideration, we will try to spend our time focusing on things that were far more important to all of the people we spoke to. One thing that almost everyone we spoke to agreed on is that an important element of the website is some way to view events in the region. We are planning to first try implementing this as a calendar, and after a usability assessment we are open to the possibility of changing this to a sortable list, depending on what will work best for users and what is possible. Many people also expressed that they really like the video that is currently on the website homepage. We’ve already obtained the video used to make sure that it’s included somewhere on the new website. Based on all of the feedback from our interviews and surveys, and our research into website best practices, we’ve developed the following prioritized list of requirements for the new destination website:
Must have a consistent graphical presentation
Must rely primarily on images rather than text
Site analytics
Search Engine Optimization
Must have multilingual support
Events/Calendar
Must have a map
Should have a descriptive title
Should not have more than “two scroll bars” for pages with important information (in particular, homepage)
Should have accurate and at least general information about accommodations, local businesses, eating, and trails
Membership
Newsletter
Blog
Should have sitemap
Social media links
Contact form
Organizational emails
Product listing
While we won’t implement all of these in this order, due to practicality, we will ensure that the items at the top of the list are implemented and effective before our project ends. We have already run into a few bumps in the road as we’ve begun to design the website: we’ve found that while we can connect different domains using Wix, they can’t go to different languages as the current website has done, and we have also found that we can only use one menu bar in Wix instead of having multiple, preventing us from having different “homepages” for the different categories of user (tourist, professional, local). These will just change our plans slightly, however, and since we discovered them early on we’ll be able to address them easily. We’re looking forward to the weeks ahead of finally being able to ramp up the development of the website, and we hope that the time we spent over the past week discovering the opinions of some of the users of this website will contribute to a final product that fully meets everyone’s needs.
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