Blog homeOne of the areas that I don’t believe travel companies spent enough time on is running web design experiments.
It is still early days for the web - and there is still plenty to learn - which is why our collective failure to experiment does surprise me a little. Also, when people do release interesting functionality, I think we are all a bit quick to judge… next year I promise to let things mature a little before I review a new site.
In the UK we have Thomson Labs - which is an interesting place to see what Thomson (one of our leading tour operators) may have coming shortly - but this is hardly at the same scale of R&D as in other industries. Likewise I haven’t seen Universities etc coming up with too much in the web experimentation field…. should I have expected this? What is an academic’s role in this new travel industry?
I myself have done a bit of “R&D” - publishing 3 papers on reservation system usability - which for a small company I feel is a sufficient contribution to our collective knowledge.
Not only does experimentation let you learn what works and doesn’t work - but it also helps you retain those employees who have a bit of creative flair - who are otherwise “bored” with the day to day of running an ecommerce website (which, lets face it, is not as exciting as other web opportunities that are out there)
Anyway, I have an experiment that has been running for a year now…. which is causing me a problem. The question is what do I do about it.
My experiment is a web service called FeedCycle - it is a mechanism that lets you send out RSS feeds that are cyclic… or where subscribers start on day 1 of a feed - regardless of when they subscribe (i.e. if subscriber B starts today they start on day 1 - but subscriber A, who started last week, is now receiving day 7).
A travel example can be found on Go-Overland.com (about overland expeditions). There you can subscribe to a 35 day virtual tour (the same length as the real tour) - and every day you receive a diary entry (via RSS) for what you would experience if you went on the actual trip.
FeedCycle has also been used by other non-travel organisations - for example the UK Open University in sending out course materials. This is quite exciting for a development that only took me a couple of weekends (I do like fiddling around with websites!). Not only that, but FeedCycle got reviewed by TechCrunch - which was an amazing experience I would love to repeat again in the future…. but on a system that I actually spent more time on!
So the problem with experiments is that sometimes you learn from them - but need to stop them. This would be easy if you were doing a desktop tool - as you could just not release an update - but with a web service (where I am still hosting it) - you are stuck - because if you turn it off - all existing users get their service removed.
Umm….. a problem….. and one I will have to solve in the coming weeks - because TourCMS (our travel ecommerce platform) needs the resources that FeedCycle is now taking up….
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You could always try and sell it. If for nothing else people are going to be interested because you’ve been reviewed by Techcrunch
I’d be kind of interested in it myself if I could think of a way to apply this to Travellerspoint (no inspiration right now…)!