Blog homeHere is a great quote from a recent post on Particletree - a blog that I really enjoy reading - describing what TripAdvisor are doing with their site….
The post in question was about prioritising feature development.
For those of you thinking that data driven development [decision making] requires a complex system of monitoring and analytics, you’ll be surprised to know that you can even do it with something as simple as a 404 error. Tech-savvy members of the web community know that a 404 error is likely the fault of the web developer. However, Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor.com wagers that when your Mom surfs the internet and encounters one, she just assumes (without assigning blame) that ‘something went wrong’, presses the back button, and chooses another link.
And so before deciding to spend engineering resources to develop costly features on TripAdvisor, he would often determine whether something would have a strong uptake by creating a fake button or interface element of the feature on the site and have it lead to a 404 page he monitored. He’d then publish the link on a subset of his web servers for a statistically relevant period of time and count the number of click-throughs. If the count for the link is high, he’ll task his developers with the creation of the actual feature. If not, he’ll direct his staff to create something else. It was simple, saved him lots of money and only cost him some slightly confused users.
What?
If ParticleTree are right (and no reason to doubt them - just they haven’t sourced where they found out this information about TripAdvisor) - then TripAdvisor are playing a canny game. Relying on a consumer not blaming TripAdvisor for a broken site does take a bit of guts…. as ParticleTree say - experienced web people probably would blame the site - I would.
I have played a similar game before….. a few years back I was testing a new idea for an itinerary sharing system…. quite neat it was. Anyway, I built a front end that looked quite good - and chucked it up on a live site - and for 30 minutes only - pushed some Google advertising at it….. I am afraid that none of the users who signed up got the functionality they thought they were going to get….. (so I probably pissed them off) but I did learn a great deal about what people want….. and whether the concept was worth developing or not…. as it happens, it was a great idea - but too difficult to monetise - and as I have mentioned before - on the web I only want to work on directly monetisable functionality now….
So….. today’s bonus prize is - find (and screen shot) an error 404 page on TripAdvisor that ought to be new functionality…… they have over 8 million pages on their site….. so, er, this may take you a little while to go through them all!
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