Qunar Mobile APP Product Analysis Report

According to iResearch Consulting Group’s monitoring data, China Mobile’s average monthly online travel visits accounted for 72.0% in 2014, compared with 59.8% last year.

Users’ use of travel apps can be mainly divided into air tickets, hotels, and vacation products, among which air tickets are the most in demand, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the transaction volume.

Among mobile travel apps, Qunar , Ctrip , and Alitrip·Qua are the most popular products used by users. This article takes the Qunar mobile app into consideration and conducts some simple analysis based on the three dimensions of air tickets, hotels, and vacations, combined with user needs.

Demand Analysis

The essence of users using travel apps is to efficiently obtain the information they need through the application, so as to help them make the best decisions quickly and formulate their own travel plans.

Flights

There are usually the following scenarios for purchasing air tickets:

I have a specific schedule and need to book a ticket for a certain day and a return trip.
There is no specific date requirement, and I want to buy cheap air tickets within a certain period of time.
There are requirements for aircraft take-off and landing times, such as needing to arrive at the destination at noon.
In summary, users’ needs when purchasing air tickets include: convenient booking of tickets for specific dates and return tickets, the ability to book tickets at low prices, and convenient screening of aircraft take-off and landing times.

hotel

When users book a hotel, they usually have the following scenarios:

Once you have determined your target hotel, you can directly search for the hotel and make reservations.

There is no specific goal, you need to choose a hotel that meets your requirements within a certain area. Some users have higher requirements for quality, while others may pay more attention to cost-effectiveness.

I don't have too many requirements, I just want to find a cheap hotel with convenient transportation.

From the above scenarios, we can conclude that the needs of users when booking hotels are: convenient and accurate search for specific hotels, convenient search for hotels around a certain place, and efficient screening of prices, hotel stars, types, etc.

Vacation Products

Vacation products can be mainly divided into: attraction tickets and tour group products. Users mainly have the following scenarios when purchasing.

The itinerary has been planned and only the tickets for attractions need to be purchased online.

I don't know where to go, and I want to check out recommended attractions and then travel by myself or with a group.

I want to find tourist attractions that suit my interests, such as historical attractions, literary and artistic attractions, etc.

To summarize the above scenarios, users’ needs when purchasing vacation products are: being able to buy tickets for designated attractions, receiving recommendations for attractions and being able to travel in a group, and personalized classification of attractions.

Product Analysis

After analyzing the needs of users, let’s take a look at how well Qunar’s mobile app meets these needs.

front page

The homepage of the APP adopts a nine-square grid navigation format, which is divided into several major sections including hotels, air tickets, travel and vacation, local entertainment, and overseas free travel. The advantage of using this form of navigation is that a large number of category entries can be displayed in a limited space. For users, they can quickly locate their goals when entering the homepage and enter the corresponding page to avoid being disturbed by other elements and reduce thinking time.

A search bar is displayed at the top of the homepage, which allows users with clear goals to quickly find hotels and attractions, and effectively solves the need for clear goals in the above demand analysis.

Flights

On the air ticket purchase page, you only need to enter the three most basic information: departure city, arrival city, and departure time to quickly search for air tickets. This is very convenient for users who have very clear travel plans. At the same time, you only need to select the return date in the round-trip tab to quickly purchase a round-trip ticket.

Qunar has made a lot of designs to meet the needs of price-sensitive users. At the bottom of the page there are "Special Airfares", "Price Trends" and "Low Price Attention". These entrances are designed to help users find low-price airfares.

After entering the flight list, the APP provides a variety of filtering functions to meet the needs of different users. Users who have requirements for flight take-off and landing times can click "Take-off Time" at the bottom of the page to filter the search results. Users who are more price-sensitive can click "Price Low to High" to sort the airfares from low to high. Click on the price calendar at the top to view the prices of each day very intuitively in the form of a calendar. At the same time, the "low price reminder" in the upper right corner of the page can automatically remind users of low-price air tickets within a period of time. Qunar also has a very unique recommendation of nearby routes, which is undoubtedly a great tool for users who want to find cheap air tickets.

From manual inquiries to automatic reminders, this series of functions can be said to very well meet the needs of users who want low-cost air tickets. A variety of filtering functions can also help different users quickly find the air tickets that suit them.

However, the prices shown in the query list do not mean that you can actually buy air tickets at such prices. As Qunar is a platform, a large number of third-party air ticket suppliers are connected to the application. When we click on a flight, we will enter the price list provided by the third party. Various insurances and packages are also added to these prices. The price display is relatively confusing, and there is still a lot of room for optimization of the page.

hotel

You can quickly search by entering your destination and date on the hotel booking page. If you already have a target hotel, you can enter it in the keywords to quickly find the hotel. There are also multiple geographical locations to choose from on the keyword page. This function can satisfy both the scenario of finding a specific hotel and the scenario of finding a hotel near a certain location. At the same time, the destination not only supports designated cities, but also can locate your own location and find nearby hotels. This is very practical for users who want to find nearby hotels to quickly check in during their travels.

After entering the hotel list, a variety of filtering functions are provided at the bottom and top of the page. "Star Price" can meet users' requirements for different qualities. The various types of locations in the "Location Area" allow users to easily choose hotels around a certain place. In the "Comprehensive Filter", more detailed division of needs can be made, and multiple selections are supported. These filters and sorting methods can basically meet users' needs for finding hotels in various scenarios.

On the hotel details page, ratings and user reviews are listed at the top, which is also the information that users care about most. Just like everyone has the habit of reading reviews when buying things on Taobao, these reviews can play a big role in user decision-making. The list of room types and prices below is simple and clear, allowing users to make decisions quickly.

Vacation Products

Vacation products have a special "ticket" entrance on the homepage. On the ticket page, users can search for a specific attraction they want to visit at the top. If there is no clear goal, users can select the attraction category in the category navigation below the search. There are also popular attraction tickets at the bottom of the page. If users don’t know where to go, it is a good choice to see where others are going. These functions basically cover various scenarios when users purchase tickets.

Another type of vacation product is package tours, which can be divided into domestic tours and overseas tours. By selecting the destination and departure time, you can get a list of tour groups. You can use the filtering function to define conditions such as the number of days of the trip, the route, the price range, etc. There are a large number of tour group products, but when users are faced with so many choices, the application does not provide much effective information to help them make decisions, and the existing filtering and classification functions are still a bit rough. Only filtering and classification based on scenarios and crowd personalities can allow users to quickly narrow down their choices based on their interests. If an evaluation system can be introduced, it will be of great help to users in making decisions. On the other hand, it will also promote the improvement of the quality of travel group products.

I personally think that Qunar has too many entrances in the travel and vacation section, which can easily make users lost. You can enter the search page from the "Travel and Vacation" entrance on the homepage. There are 8 entrances below the search bar, and 4 Tab bar navigations at the bottom. You can also enter the tour group list from "Group Travel Purchase" on the homepage, and there are multiple categories on the page.

When there are multiple routes to complete a task, users will be confused about which route they should take. Are the contents in different entrances different? Do we have to go in and check every entrance?

Providing users with a core path is what current APP design advocates.

Let’s consider this problem from a practical scenario. For example, I have a clear destination, I want to go to Beijing, and I want to find a tour group. On the homepage, I can click on "Travel and Vacation" or "Travel Group Buying". If I enter from the "Travel and Vacation" page, I can directly search for the destination, and then there is "Group Buying" below. I think there may be cheap deals in "Group Buying", so I click in to take a look. There is also a “Special Offer” in the bottom navigation. Will there be cheaper items there? Click to see it too. This is just one main route. We can also enter from the "Group Travel Purchase" on the homepage. After entering, there is a search bar at the top. I can search for "Beijing" to find it. There is also a "Domestic Group Travel" below. Beijing should be considered domestic, so I went in to take a look. After entering, I found that I still had to choose a destination.

There are so many ways to browse with a clear destination, and there are even more ways to browse casually without a clear destination. When users browse in such a page structure, they can't figure out their direction, and the experience is really not good.

Interface Design

Travel apps need to carry a lot of information, so how to reasonably design and display this information is a very important thing. The Qunar APP has a unique design, but there are also some unreasonable aspects.

advantage:

The use of a nine-grid and tab bar navigation format is conducive to displaying a large number of entrances, allowing users to directly locate what they want to find on the homepage.

The page for air ticket and hotel inquiry is designed to be simple and easy to use, and some functions that meet the needs of different users are added at the bottom of the page. The priorities are clear, and the functions are powerful yet simple.

The flight list page highlights the core information that users are most concerned about: flight take-off and landing times and prices, and downplays other information so that users can focus their attention and obtain information more efficiently.

Below I will mainly talk about what I personally think are the shortcomings of the design.

insufficient:

Too much information displayed and repeated

The biggest feeling that the Qunar APP gives me is that it displays too much information, and each page is filled with various information and entrances. For example, there is a group purchase entrance in the "Travel and Vacation" section on the homepage, which is the same as the "Travel Group Purchase" on the homepage. It feels inappropriate to list "Local Entertainment" as a separate large section on the homepage, and it is grouped together with movie tickets, takeout and the like. It feels like this is just chasing after the hot spots in the market. Qunar's own positioning is not suitable for doing this, and it is not competitive at all compared with other competitors. Doing all this purely for strategic planning gives people a very stiff feeling.

The bottom tab bar navigation is divided into 5 columns, among which "Orders" can be completely merged into the "My" section. After entering the "Customer Service" column, the Tab bar navigation bar disappears and becomes another page design, giving people a feeling of inconsistent style and experience.

In the nine-square grid navigation on the homepage, there are small text prompts between different categories, which are not easy to notice if you don’t look carefully. There is already a clear title in each navigation, and adding these small words gives people a feeling of superfluousness and affects the simplicity of the page. In the navigation, the "Hotel" column displays the red envelope very prominently, while the word "Hotel" is displayed very small, which not only destroys the consistency of style but also affects users' ability to find this category.

There are too many page entries and the levels are too deep.

In the Qunar APP, whether it is the first-level page or the second-level page, there are a large number of entrances. Giving users too many choices will cause user confusion. For example, when you click on the "Discover" column from the homepage, there are 8 entry buttons at the top. After selecting "Weekend Tour", there are two rows of entrances at the top of the page. After clicking on these entrances, you will reach the list page.

For example, after entering the "Travel and Vacation" section, there are 8 entrances. After selecting "Group Buying", there are 4 more entrances. You have to choose one to reach the list page.

This kind of design gives people the feeling that there are too many things piled up, but in fact, the more information provided to users is not necessarily better. Of course, this does not mean that having many entrances and many functions is not a good thing. If different entrances are used to complete relatively independent tasks and the user's path is still clear, then there is no problem. But if there are multiple entrances for users to complete a task, then users will feel lost and don’t know which path is the best. The essence of travel apps is to efficiently provide users with effective information to help them make the best decisions. Too many entrances not only hinder users from finding information efficiently, but also make users doubt whether the current path they see is the best. As a result, some users constantly try different paths to find information, constantly entering and returning, but in the end they find several entrances with the same content. In today's world where minimalist style is advocated, such design wastes users' time and energy and provides a poor user experience .

When it comes to vacation products, we should refer to the air ticket and hotel pages to give users a main line of operation, and then provide other extended functions and categories without interfering with the user's main operation.

Summarize

The hotel and air ticket modules of this version of Qunar APP are very well done, but the application as a whole displays too much information and seems a bit heavy, especially in the vacation product module. An excellent application needs to take into account both user experience and commercial value. It is not advisable to lean towards either side. In this version of the APP, we can see Qunar's broader business ambitions and its entry into the local life field. Although it is a strategic layout, it is understandable. However, Qunar’s product positioning and its own advantages are not suitable for this field. Travel is its foundation. The success of Airbnb may give some inspiration to Qunar. Vigorously developing non-standard travel products other than regular hotels and creating a shared economy in travel may be what Qunar is better at, while also avoiding the fierce competition in the current red ocean field.

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