Abstract
In today's digital world, smartphones and web-based applications have gained remarkable importance throughout the globe. These smart applications are playing a very significant role in maintaining a powerful business. As well as, they are helping a lot to expand these businesses via social networks. Social media networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are playing a prominent role to promote the companies. In the hospitality sector, most of the companies are running their hotel booking systems by utilizing mobile applications and a web based infrastructure, but usability issues still exist. This study has been conducted specifically to tackle the usability issues of hotel booking systems and the best utilization of social networks to promote the business. TripAdvisor was selected as an authentic source for selecting those systems and two international hotels are selected for this study. The first step is to identify different hotel booking systems. In the second step, the user's satisfaction level was measured for the selected systems by performing the System Usability Scale (SUS, Quick & Dirty) approach. Additionally, by which source (social media or personal relations) they found these hotels. It is found that the SUS rating for both systems is below the acceptable level of usability. The Mean SUS for hotel 1 is found at 55.25 and 51.2 for hotel 2. The third step was to identify the user interface (UI) issues, and heuristic evaluation is performed for this. The experts identified the UI issues on the basis of their experience. The major issues were related to the visibility of system status, error prevention, flexibility and efficiency of use. Depending upon the identified issues, an interactive UI (prototype) for the selected web-based applications was proposed. This prototype is mainly based on the user's perspective. This prototype can be used for improving the UI of the selected systems which is based on the user's perspective. During the process of verifying the satisfaction level, it is revealed that the targeted audience is not able to use these systems efficiently and effectively. The reason behind this is the negligence of usability guidelines throughout the process of design and development of these hotel booking systems. Therefore, it is highly recommended that the usability of these systems should be evaluated and redesigned, based on expert opinions. It has also been observed that the reviews/feedback of customers has spread a negative impact through social networks.