An Evaluation of a Destination Website - Case Study Example

Introduction: Tourism has now emerged as one of the biggest industries in the world. According to the United Nations World Travel Organization, nearly 900 million travellers visited countries across the world and this does not count the number of domestic travellers. "In 2007, international tourist arrivals grew by an estimated 6% to reach a new record figure of nearly 900 million - an astonishing achievement given that the 800 million mark was only reached two years earlier." (World Tourist Arrivals: From 800 Million to 900 Million in Two Years. 2008). In such a scenario, it is imperative that tourism markets across the world try and attract the maximum number of tourists into their countries and regions. In this age of connectivity and communication, the internet is an ideal medium to attract travellers and many tourism organizations and private companies engaged in this industry have created informative and well designed websites for this purpose. Websites are ideal for this purpose since they can provide facts, information, visuals and communication. Visitors can browse through such sites fix a place to visit, make travel arrangements, make bookings etc all thorough a well designed destination site. "The Internet appears to have overtaken many established resources utilised in the tourism industry and is now second only to recommendations by friends or family. (Using the Internet to Promote your Product: Tourism on the Internet: Research and Planning. 2001). This paper is a review of a destination website called 'incredibleindia.com' with reference to how a well designed and effective travel destination site should be made. A personal review will be made followed by a study using participants to verify my findings. Components of a well designed destination website: There are certain characteristics that any website, including destination sites, should have. The essential elements that should be reviewed are design, content, usability, and interactivity. Design: The webpage is a visual medium and hence should be well designed. Some of the considerations that should be taken into account while designing are the colour, layout, text size, font, pictures etc. The design of websites will vary according to the subject it covers. For example, if the subject is more academic in nature, pictures may not be very important. But for a destination site, pictures and even moving images are essential for it to be eye catching. There should be uniformity or consistency of different pages in the web site. That is, it should look as if all the pages are from the same website. Jarring colours should not be used. With regard to the site under review, the design is simple. The page is uncluttered and colours are light. The dominant colours are light green and blue with text predominantly in blue and white. The absence of pictures are a disappointment and the only picture given appears to be someplace outside India. There is nothing outstanding about the design of the website. So, as a destination site, it is highly disappointing in terms of design. "The design and layout of your site is the next most important part of building a website. Make a bad choice here and it won't matter how great your content is or how much advertising you do. If your site looks bad no one will visit and those that do won't stay long or buy anything." (Website Design Tips - Good Website Design. 2000-2007). Content: The most used clich about this aspect is that 'content is king'. This is true for nay published material. Content is the most important aspect in any web site. However attractive a site may be to look at will be overshadowed by poor content. Users visit web pages for a particular need and the content should satisfy it. In the words of one of the most well known authorities on web design, Jakob Nielsen: "They visit sites because there's something they want to accomplish -- maybe even buy your product. The ultimate failure of a website is to fail to provide the information users are looking for." (Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design: Not Answering users Questions. 1996-2008). The site reviewed appeared to be a directory about destinations and not a full content site about travel. Some sites do follow this style where by all information needed are listed as links to other websites. Incredibleindia.com is totally a directory site with no content whatsoever on its own. "However, consider using a directory script to run your site, as an alternative to a full content management system." (A Guide to Building a Successful Travel Destination Website: Static Website or Directory Type Website 2006-2008). Clicking on the hyperlinks directed the user to another page with a list of related web sites. On the whole it was quite inadequate because very little relevant links were available. The home page showed only links to one very few states or places in the country. India is a vast and varied place with 28 states and seven Union territories. "There are 28 states and 7 Union territories in the country." (States and Union Territories. 2005). It is disappointing that no other areas were shown prominence on the home page. The states shown were Kerala Goa, Kashmir and Rajasthan. There were also links to North Indian tours and one on the Taj Mahal. In some cases irrelevant results were also obtained. Clicking on the Kerala link took me to page showing just one result, that of a private tour operating company. In a navigation bar at the top of the page, I clicked on 'Holidays in Kerala'. The resulting page showed holidays to countries like Cuba, Malta and Turkey. The logic behind this is unclear. Content wise, there is no static or own content. Content should also be up to date and well maintained sites show the date of last update. No information on the matter is given here. As for listing of other sites, users had to take a chance in the hope of finding a relevant page. The site scores poorly in content evaluation. It also shows irrelevant or out of context results. Usability: Usability refers to the ease of using the page. "Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use". (Usability 101, Introduction to Usability: What (Definition of Usability). 2003). According to Nielsen, usability is determined by five components, namely learnability, efficiency, memorability and errors and satisfaction. Learnability refers to the ease of learning to navigate the site. Efficiency is the speed at which users can perform tasks in the site. Memorability is the ability to browse the page even after a long absence from the site. Errors refer to the mistakes made by users and satisfaction refers to user's perception on the design of the page. Unless the page is easy to use, users will soon quit from the site. The site under review scores on all points mentioned here mainly because it has a simple design. Interactivity: Interactivity refers to the page's ability to interact with the user. "WEB PAGE INTERACTIVITY is a reference to "dynamic" content; two way communication capabilities between the web site and the end user." (Web page design: Interactivity). Search facility, hot counters, guest books, online shopping facility, chat facility etc are examples of interactivity. The more interactive the site is, the more useful it will be for the user. Incredibleindia.com has only a search facility that can be termed to be an interactive feature. Research Methodology: The methodology for research has been though data collection using primary and secondary sources. Review using secondary sources has already been done above. Data has been sourced mainly from relevant web pages. While doing so, care had been taken to collect data that appeared to be unbiased. For primary research five students from the college five from among acquaintances outside the college were used. While selecting acquaintances, care was taken to see that young, middle-aged and older people were included. The other criteria for selection were that all participants like to travel and were quite familiar in browsing the internet. In the first case actual travel within or outside the country by the participants were not taken into account. In the second case, only participants who used the internet for more that 5 hours on an average per week were used. The survey was a qualitative one. Participants were asked to rate the website on the basis of a questionnaire. The questionnaire was divided into five parts. The first part under the heading 'general questions' contained five questions. The four analysis points mentioned above have been incorporated into these questions. The second part, under the heading 'design' contained six questions. The third part under the heading 'content, contained five questions. The fourth part was under the heading 'usability' contained six question and the final part under the heading 'interactivity' contained five questions. The participants were divided equally among male and females. Apart from the six college students mentioned above, two were school teachers (one male and one female), one was a businessman (male) and the rest were employees (one male and one female) of a private organisation. Among the students, three were female and two were male. The questionnaire is appended at the end of the paper. Design (Rating scale 1 to 5): Respondents had a reasonably good opinion of the design, though most of them felt that there was nothing outstanding. The overall view was above average scoring 3.5. The colour scheme got a good response of 4. At least half of the respondents felt that fonts used could have been better. Answers as to pictures were very disappointing with both regarding quality and content. Most of the participants felt that the one an only picture in the site was not from India. Consistency also scored well since the site has been fairly consistent throughout. Overall the opinion was just slightly above average. Content (Rating scale 1 to 5): This was the most disappointing aspect of the whole site as can be seen from the responses. The question as to what the respondents thought of the site as related to travel was below average. Opinions about pictures were extremely poor. It was almost identical to the question of attractions. Only the question on relevant content scored relatively well. this came as a surprise to me, but the opinion must have come about due to the fact that respondents rated this after visiting outside pages linked through this site. Usability (Rating scale 1 to 5): This was the classification that received the highest rating from among the respondents. Almost all respondents felt that the site had a simple and uncluttered design and hence easy to understand. Efficiency was also highly rated at 4.2. The only low score was 2.8 for recall. This was mainly due to the fact that the site had only headings and practically no textual content. Respondents found no errors though some of the links appeared to be irrelevant or misplaced. Subjectivity pleasing also scored poorly. The responses were mixed with scoring ranging from a high of 4,7 to a low of 2. Interactivity: Overall opinions of interactivity were poor. This series of questions were based on a 'yes' and 'no' answer model. Eight respondents felt that interactive features in the site were poor. This tallies with my opinion since the only interactive option in the whole site is a search facility. When the respondents were asked whether a login facility would be appropriate, only three answered in the affirmative. This was mainly due to the fact that since other features like bookings and shopping were not available, there was no point in incorporating such a facility. As to adequacy of the search facility, six respondents felt that it was so. This is quite correct in the sense that searches in most cases did not give any results, but when it did give results, at least relevant links seem to be given. Incorporation of a guest book was quite enthusiastic since seven persons thought it would be a good idea. The main reason given was that a lot of opinions about how to improve the site were necessary and it could be done through the guest book. Overall interactivity was given a low score of two. Interactivity Analysis: It can be seen that the personal evaluation of the writer and the results from the survey are in agreement with each other. The overall quality of the website has been deemed to be poor. The positive aspects of this site are its easy usability and speed. Most respondents have given good scores in this regard. But with most other aspects the feedback was quite poor. The content of the web site were poor both in quality and volume. There seems to be only one picture on the entire web site. There were also few misleading links. Most respondents felt that they would not visit the country on the basis of the content in the site. Most of them also felt that they did feel the website worthy of a second visit. Conclusion: Overall the website did not live up to the name of incredible India. There is nothing incredible about the website at all. In fact it appeared to be more of a travel directory than a web page. The whole or even a majority of the area was represented. Most searches turned out no results or sometimes even irrelevant results. It can be said that the site is a poor representative of a destination site. It may even be that its creators did not intend to slot the site in that category. What they might have intended was to create it as a random travel directory. It could also be that the site is still under construction and has been released prematurely. Recommendations: To classify the site incredibleindia.com as a destination site is very difficult. A lot of effort has to be made to see that the site transformed into a proper destination website. To make the site a destination directory also needs a lot of effort. More and relevant links have to be added. There should also be a lot of pictures because it is what initially attracts a traveller. It would be better to create a totally different site, but using some of the relevant data, links and information already available in incredibleindia.com. Bibliography A Guide to Building a Successful Travel Destination Website: Static Website or Directory Type Website (2006-2008). [online]. Wizz Websites and Resources. Last accessed 18 May 2008 at: http://wizz.ws/#quality States and Union Territories. (2005). [online]. Know India, India.gov.in, India. Last accessed 18 May 2008 at: http://www.india.gov.in/knowindia/state_uts.php Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design: Not Answering users Questions. (1996-2008). [online]. Jakob Nielsen's alert box. Last accessed 18 May 2008 at: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html Using the Internet to Promote your Product: Tourism on the Internet: Research and Planning. (2001). [online]. Tourism New South Wales. Last accessed 18 May 2008 at: http://corporate.tourism.nsw.gov.au/Sites/SiteID6/objLib14/internet_promotion.pdf Usability 101, Introduction to Usability: What (Definition of Usability). (2003). [online]. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox. Last accessed 18 May 2008 at: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html Website Design Tips - Good Website Design. (2000-2007). [online]. ebizwebpages.com - Build your own Website, FAST and EASY. Last accessed 18 May 2008 at: http://www.ebizwebpages.com/good_website_design Web page design: Interactivity. [online]. EET, Encyclopaedia of Educational Technology Last accessed 18 May 2008 at: http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/wpdinteractive/index.htm World Tourist Arrivals: From 800 Million to 900 Million in Two Years. (2008). [online]. UNWTO World Tourism Barometer - Committed to Tourism, Travel and the Millennium Development Goals. Vol. 6. Last accessed 18 May 2008 at: http://www.unwto.org/facts/eng/pdf/barometer/UNWTO_Barom08_1_excerpt_en.pdf Questionnaire Please answer the following questions regarding web site evaluation of incredibleindia.com General Questions: Q.1. Please give your age in the following format. Mm/dd/yr Q.2. Please give your gender. Q.3. How many hours on an average do you access the web (per day) Q.4. Do you visit destination sites while browsing Q.5. If yes, what is the frequency Design: Q.1. What is your opinion on overall design Q.2. What is your opinion of the colour scheme used Q.3. How do you like the font/fonts used Q.4. How do you feel about the picture/pictures in the website Q.5. Do you feel that the site has maintained consistency throughout its pages Q.6 What is your opinion abut the headings Content: Q.1. What is your opinion of the site content in the context of a destination website Q.2. How would you rate the site with regard to pictorial representations like maps and charts Q.3 How would you rate the site with reference to locations in India Q.4. How would you rate the site with reference to attractions in the country Q.5. How would you rate the site with reference to updating of relevant content Usability: Q.1. Please rate the site with regard to ease of understanding. Q.2. How do you rate the site with regard to learning how to use the site Q. 3. How do you rate the site as to its efficiency Q.4. How do you rate the site with regard to remembering or recall of the site Q.5. How do you rate the site with reference to errors Q.6. How do you rate the site with reference to subjectivity pleasing Interactivity: Q.1. Do you feel that adequate interactive features are there in the site Q.2. Would you feel that providing a login feature in the website would have been a good idea Q.3. Is the search facility in the web site adequate Q.4. Would incorporating a guest book facility enhance the site value Q.5. Do you feel that the communication between user and system is adequate Thank you for taking the time and trouble to answer the questions. Read More