Test with users from abroad
“Gondwana Hotel” are two hotels located in Noumea, New Caledonia. They are the first eco-friendly, cultural, and artistic hotels in New Caledonia.
The management team decided to update the related website, for both modernizations, and to attract Australian visitors.
Meet the family: at Gondwana City Green and Gondwana City Art
Gondwana Hotel is a family business with two establishments where it is good to rest while respecting the environment. The Gondwana Hotel City Green, 3 stars, is the first hotel certified High Environmental Quality Overseas. The Gondwana Hotel City Art is a 2 stars establishment offering accommodation in Noumea and offers an immersion in the Caledonian artistic universe through 24 rooms embellished by local artists, showing their unique and authentic works. One can find within the hotels a multitude of services to fully enjoy a stay.
Gondwana Hotel challenges:
Gondwana Hotel relied on a digital exposure to attract foreign guests, especially from Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Despite the website to be completely translated into English, and some efforts put on SEO, online ads and third-party booking platforms, traffic and conversion rate were a bit disappointing. Hotel team especially had doubts regarding UX and about the English translation of the website, while not having any real options to test this with foreign users.
Testeum Solution:
The stakeholders in the project were Gondwana Hotels, as the solution customer, and Tealforge web agency, their local supplier for developing the website, providing a link to the application Testeum. We provided Gondwana Hotel with a turnkey package including the test copywriting, the test campaign management, and the finalized test reports delivered to both the Tealforge development team and Gondwana Hotel.
During the test campaigns, users are invited to give structured feedback, pointing out any issue with the UX or translation. This allows the Hotels Gondwana team to review the message on the website and gives a good basis for discussion with the development team.
Details:
Audience: 5 English speaking users, from Australia.
Conditions: The testers installed a screen recording app to share their actual journeys during the tests.
The alternatives to Testeum services are:
- Friends or family: get one’s relatives to test the release candidate.
- Pros: no money involved.
- Cons: biased, not necessarily targeted audience, little to no structure for feedback, turnaround time is uncertain.
- Focus group: use a marketing agency to gather people matching audience criteria.
- Pros: criteria match, feedback on NPS.
- Cons: expensive, feedback not structured.
- Development team fully responsible for the testing.
- Pros: efficient for functional testing.
- Cons: not targeted audience, biased for UI, costs.
Detailed benefits:
Actual feedback from a specific audience: especially from people you couldn’t interview.
Fresh eyes from testers: real world feedback like end users would do.
Increased confidence in the application, resulted from this feedback from potential users.
Traffic and conversion increase: for Australian users by a 4 factor.
Conversion rate also doubled, getting direct sales more important than third parties booking platforms.
KPI’s
Costs:
700 € for a turnkey offer.
Included :
- 4 hours of project management,
- 1 Test campaign for a 30 minutes journey done by 5 testers.
Duration:
7 days to complete the campaign.
Results:
28 bugs, including 17 suggestions on site UI or UX related features.
