From mobile first to everything
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As presented by Matteo Doni at DroidCon Dubai 2016 and March of the Droids 2016. A long walk through Skyscanner's recent history as a mobile first business, and how the industry is changing so much that messaging and platforms, or apps within apps, may soon replace the traditional notion of 'native' and app stores completely.
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From mobile first to everything
- 1. From Mobile First to Everything Matteo Doni @todoleo …
- 3. 2003 Skyscanner launched 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
- 4. Skyscanner launched Expands across Europe with foreign site launches First 100k visits in a day Singapore business established to support APAC growth First app launched Beijing office opened Miami business established to support Americas growth Skyscanner moves from flights to travel with car hire launch and hotel technology acquisition Sequoia secondary investment values Skyscanner at $800million 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 Launched apps for hotels and car hire Acquired Youbibi and opened office in Shenzen Acquired Distinction and opened office in Budapest Sofia office opened Joint venture with Yahoo! JAPAN launched Skyscanner powers MSN travel worldwide 2016 Larger Budapest office and London office open
- 5. Truly global flight coverage 80% visitors from outside the UK market 45 countries with over 50,000 visitors per month Edinburgh, Glasgow & London Miami Singapore BeijingBarcelona Budapest Sofia Shenzhen
- 7. Our ultimate goal: to make travel booking as easy as it is today to buy a book online
- 8. Amazon made online book-buying mainstream Never complacent about new tech and its benefits When technology allowed, they made Kindle popular
- 9. Paperback hardback Audiobook Kindle Still largely the same static product Direct sale or Marketplace
- 10. Compare that to air travel 700 airlines 14,000 airports 1000 providers Near-infinite route-date combinations 26 seat classes Taxes Fees
- 11. Multiply this problem by thousands of devices
- 12. Stop and think
- 13. App performance
- 14. App performance Are you doing the right thing?
- 15. What is Mobile? Mobile phone?
- 16. What is Mobile? Laptop with poor connection?
- 17. What is Mobile? Newspaper guy?
- 18. What’s in a phone?
- 19. Apps and Web
- 20. Context Giving people what they want, when they want it, without doing very much
- 21. Context Awareness of the platform and what you can usefully offer on it
- 22. The Mobile Mind Shift “The expectation that I can get what I want in my immediate context in my moment of need’."
- 24. Are you still doing the right thing? Decision time – build an app?
- 25. Lean on the platform Platforms and OSs Provides guidelines and expectations Standard Components Already provide useful, tested ways to do things (eg. cocoapods) Your specific use cases Build only the minimum pieces you need to hit that platform in the most useful way Wider Internet Standards, communities, open source
- 26. Think small
- 27. Apps within apps? The shifting market
- 28. The shifting market Thick and thin versions of products
- 29. Architecture The four-tier engagement platform With thanks to Forrester Research Application delivery Optimisation, caching, personalisation Data sources Many and varied, internal, external, social, real-time Data transformation Aggregation and translation of many data sources Clients Many of them – mobile, IoT, desktop Rendered to suit
- 30. Travel buddies
- 31. All made real by the Messaging Economy
- 32. Odds and ends
- 33. Products going back to the future “I always like to rewind to what people did before technology. Before the web era, we just had conversations.” David Marcus Head of Facebook Messenger
- 34. Background “Old: All software expands until it includes messaging New: All messaging expands until it includes software” Benedict Evans, a16z
- 35. An example of booking a taxi Benefits: no download, no install, rich interaction, consistent UI across ‘apps’
- 36. An example of using an ‘operator’
- 37. The advantages of messaging No download and no install to add a new service Asynchronous both in delivery mechanism and variable speed communication style Very low data usage and excellent intermittent network behaviour Inherently social, works for 1-1, 1-N and N-N scenarios Provides persistent context and an ongoing communication channel Identity always provided Inherently cross-device and cross-platform Performs well on feature phones and low-end smartphones Rich platform context and services
- 38. WeChat leads the way Lessons from China 650 million WeChat users 30% registered for payment 28 million online stores All from a messaging app
- 39. Facebook Messenger & M 700 million MAU – Businesses on Messenger in UK Q1 2016
- 40. SMS - not dead yet!
- 41. The power of conversation “Get me a KLM flight from Edinburgh to Amsterdam, September 8 to 12, for under £100” At least 2 typed fields and 8 steps, replaced by parsing 1 single phrase
- 42. New technology We work hard to understand and embed ourselves into all interesting technologies which make this ‘buddy’ goal real
- 44. Edinburgh Quartermile One 15 Lauriston Place Edinburgh EH3 9EN Glasgow 5th floor, 151-155 St Vincent St, Glasgow G2 5NW Singapore No. 08-01&04 & 09- 04 8th floor, Robinson Point, 39 Robinson Rd, Singapore Beijing Level 19, Tower E2, Oriental Plaza, No. 1 East Chang An Avenue, Dong Cheng District, Beijing 100738 Miami 1395 Brickell Ave, Suite 900, Miami, Florida 33131 Barcelona Torre NN, Calle Tarragona, 157, 4a Planta, Barcelona, 08014 Thank you
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon - it’s a pleasure to be asked to present here and talk about some of the things we’re working on at Skyscanner – particularly around Echo and Alexa.
- But first, I’ll give a quick introduction to Skyscanner and what we do. Skyscanner is a travel meta search, which means we search many providers on your behalf, to find all possible options and prices for flights, hotels and car hire. We started small in 2003 with our founder Gareth pretty much coding on his own.
- Our initial goal was to have all budget flights in the UK….
- To having 10 offices around the world and over 700 staff, and a lot of huge milestones along the way.
- Now we can say we’re a truly global company, 80% outside our home market.
- With our Skyscanner for Business platform, we aim to “power the travel internet”, with hundreds of partners using our services. From API access to white labels and simple widgets, we are extending our reach beyond our own brand.
- Our original goal was to make travel booking as easy as it is to buy a book online. And we’ve made some great progress towards it.
- But of course that goal is a moving target because nothing stays the same. Just as Amazon revolutionsed the sale of printed books, it went on to make electronic reading mainstream when the technology enabled it. In that same way we can’t be prescriptive about which platforms we build for, or complacent about what’s coming next.
- Let's explore this for a minute. If you were to buy a book from Amazon, the outputs are fairly limited. It might be in paperback or hardback, it might be sold via Amazon, the marketplace or in Kindle form. But the input - the product you're requesting - is the same thing with the same quality.
- Just taking air travel as one part of our industry, you can immediately see the differences. Firstly the inputs, the things you can request, vary greatly straight away. There are almost unlimited date combinations, airlines who may or may not fly on those dates, the class of service you want and then various providers who will sell you a ticket, often with different pricing models. There are 700 airlines in the world and 14,000 airports - in theory you can create any route you want between two places. Even if I know I'm going from Edinburgh to our office in Singapore, with one transfer in between, I'll be able to choose over 100 routes, multiplied by dozens of sales providers. And I'm just making one search of the millions we get each day.
- Of course we can't complain, we love our users - and we want to answer these queries as quickly as the book search, despite the added complexity. We travel as much as anyone and demand the same fast answers as our users. But the complexity I just described was a problem 12 years ago when we started. Take everything I've just said and multiply it by the many platforms people use, with different devices, screen sizes, input and output methods, and the different contexts in which they are used. Our work is never done.
- But first, I’ll give a quick introduction to Skyscanner and what we do. Skyscanner is a travel meta search, which means we search many providers on your behalf, to find all possible options and prices for flights, hotels and car hire. We started small in 2003 with our founder Gareth pretty much coding on his own.
- Let’s start with the basics. Are you working on the right thing? If you don’t have any products then it’s an important question. Define your audience before you start to do anything. If you already have an app, think about what it does. Myntra, one of the biggest online retailers in India, did this the other way around – they realised an app would be a much better experience than their web site, and switched the site off. But only once they made the app really good. To try and make this more easily explained, let’s go back to the start and think about what ‘mobile’ actually means…
- The thing that gave us most to ponder in going ‘mobile first’, was trying to define what we meant by it. What is mobile? Is it someone on their phone, the simplest way to put it? Is it someone on the train on a laptop? They’re mobile by definition and by the challenges they’d in using it.
- The thing that gave us most to ponder in going ‘mobile first’, was trying to define what we meant by it. What is mobile? Is it someone on their phone, the simplest way to put it? Is it someone on the train on a laptop? They’re mobile by definition and by the challenges they’d in using it.
- The thing that gave us most to ponder in going ‘mobile first’, was trying to define what we meant by it. What is mobile? Is it someone on their phone, the simplest way to put it? Is it someone on the train on a laptop? They’re mobile by definition and by the challenges they’d in using it.
- Even if we narrowed it down to phone, what do we mean by that? Is it someone simply browsing mobile web? Or using an app? Are they deep inside a messaging app like WeChat - something almost a default behaviour in the Far East, and coming soon to Facebook Messenger and others? Is it use of a voice service proxied through a wearable?
- Even if we narrowed it down to phone, what do we mean by that? Is it someone simply browsing mobile web? Or using an app? Are they deep inside a messaging app like WeChat - something almost a default behaviour in the Far East, and coming soon to Facebook Messenger and others? Is it use of a voice service proxied through a wearable?
- In truth it’s all of them - but that’s just the start of the explanation. In the first two examples, we’re not really talking about a platform but a context. And when you drill into more of those, and the additional platforms that mobile has created, you’re talking about infinite possibilities. And that has has been documented as the ‘mobile mind shift’. It’s not about phones, it’s about hitting people with the information they want, at the time they need it, without them having to do very much.
- Take an example closer to home - maybe someone doesn’t want a flight price, maybe they just want to know where they can go, or which airline takes them there. Small queries that should be delivered by microservices to fragmented clients. Those are ideal building blocks for modern low-friction products - apps and web, and clients with no visuals like IoT or of course, voice.
- In his book for the American Marketing Association, The Mobile Mind Shift, Josh Bernoff noted: "The mobile mind shift is ‘the expectation that I can get what I want in my immediate context in my moment of need’." The book is a very good read by the way, highly recommended. What it’s trying to explain is the principle of the ‘mobile moment’ - a 2-sided context where provision and need just happen to meet. And you can’t really build an app until you’ve been through that process and thought what and who you’re building for.
- Companies that simply take their web experience and replicate it on phone, even if they use techniques like responsive design, aren’t quite getting that principle of context. Making a big thing smaller doesn’t cut it. Making a big thing into an app, even less. If you think of a modern smartphone and the mixtures of touch, geography, movement - it’s both the hardest one to get right, and the most rewarding at the same time. From there, you effectively drop capabilities as you head backwards desktop sized experiences - and the visual design isn’t really that important if the user doesn’t get what they wanted. It’s something we call ‘degrade to desktop’ – work back from the best possible experience.
- Having thought through all of this, do you really need an app? Is your product going to make use of the most modern technology? Does it exist to answer ‘mobile moments’? Is it more of a passive experience people might choose to use occasionally? If you can’t answer ‘yes’ to the above, stick to the web.If you can still answer ‘yes’, then let’s continue…
- By thinking about small blocks relevant to these particular contexts - and only building and serving those blocks at the right time, you give yourself a very efficient way to build an app. And the less you build, the less is likely to go wrong with it later. A principle I call ‘leaning on the platform’ means you’re only building the bits you actually need for your own purpose and context. There aren’t that many new problems to solve so why solve them again? [go through the principles of the slides] It’s a fact that companies like Apple and Google openly favour products in their app stores, which build in this way.
- Add that use case to some slick branding and you’ve named a product called Hotel Tonight. They don’t bother with a desktop experience; all the contexts they answer are mobile first. From notifying users when they reach a location, to the “one thumb” user experience to enable rapid booking - it couldn’t really be done this well on desktop. And their app is built almost entirely of system components from the OS, or widely-adopted open source - and with a nice design on top, so they’re not maintaining custom code all the time.
- In Korea, thanks to products like Kakao Talk, 74% of mobile users prefer to use the internet on mobile - but most of their usage is apps within apps. Similarly in China and Japan, apps like Line and WeChat are effectively their own small Internet, lots of little apps talking to each other. In truth they’re mostly Android apps reduced to a particular use case and packaged differently. These types of product will come to Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and others very soon.
- And yet, in India so many people rely on 2G connections, which has the majority of new users, Facebook has released a ‘lite’ version of its Android app to cater for them. This is effectively the same app, with some features removed, and mostly the same architecture, but rendered in a lite way so it’s a 1MB download rather than 40. But with the right engineering it’s an iteration rather than a rebuild.
- But it’s more than just design, size and platforms. It’s about the architecture of performance and how you slim things down to make them performant. Forrester Research suggested a sample forward-thinking architecture to handle just about any form of online problem - it’s called the four-tier engagement architecture. Client (many of them) Delivery (transformation of content to the best format, based on data and context) Aggregation (selection and use of multiple data sources) Data Have a think about all that before you really push on with an app, or take a step back if you already have one.
- In our report, the Future of Travel, skyscanner2024.com - we talked about the notion of “travel buddies” - assistants that know your recent history, your lifestyle preferences and even that you need to slow down your life a little bit. It might know that you’re a regular business traveller, you never check bags onto a plane, and you always want hotel rooms within a mile of your meetings. You always fly first class and always want a four star hotel.
- Travel will be more about the traveller coming first, giving intuitive ways for them to get what they want, maybe before they even know it. And what we call the Messaging Economy is at the core of it all.
- And I loved the fact that Samsung had to create a museum of its own devices, to remind us that the new S7 was actually different from their previous phone. And the fact that our friend Zuckerberg turned up and took the all the publicity away.
- The buzz around this idea seems to be getting louder every day. David Marcus, moved from PayPal to Facebook, believes that messaging will take over the business. Example here of an e-commerce site communicating order status via messenger.
- Operator is using human assistants to provide a concierge service. Note the scheduling of a future action. Also, the rich message response. Think of all too common customer service scenarios where you are waiting on hold, synchronous activity for the customer. Say you’re calling about a missing item. They have to talk to a delivery company, putting you on hold, and you get the information second hand. Imagine a messaging stream with the company. They already have the context of your order and the history of your communication about it. You can go about your life whilst waiting for a response, you will get a notification just like the conversations you have with friends. The delivery company could be asked to provide information right in the stream, visible to both parties directly. Currently you’re often looking at order status pages, searching emails from retailer and delivery company, and on the phone at the same time. Of course this is just one scenario that could be made so much better by ubiquitous messaging.
- Of course people have been doing clever things with SMS and indeed Twitterbots for a long time. Still some cool uses of SMS coming along. Digit – automated savings account that communicates with you via SMS bot. Magic - another concierge type service.
- Then take that example and imagine it inside Facebook, with its 700 million MAU?
- Imagine the billions of SMS users - basically every mobile phone ready to adopt these services?
- And then imagine how the power of those conversations and messages, can replace complex and heavily-researched interactions we’re all used to?
- At Skyscanner, we try hard to embed ourselves into all new technologies as they emerge. We send price alerts, but we don’t mind who delivers them, or when. Platforms often know their users better than we do, and we leverage that. We have a bot which responds in the Telegram app (show animated demo) because their API and SDK made that very straightforward. We’ve experimented with TV apps showing QR codes, early voice search in Windows and many other things. Basically, we don’t really care where the users are, we’ll try and meet them there, in that particular context. We try hard to stay ahead of the curve.
- Which brings us to Alexa… We knew of Echo and how cool the hardware was. Then we had a pleasant surprise in summer, when one of Amazon’s architects showed us how simple it can be to create an Alexa app. It was an obvious thing for us to jump on, another innovative service we can connect to our own platform, and a really exciting way to give people quick answers to travel queries. And it’s another important piece of the “travel buddy” jigsaw which gives answers in another context.