Reaching Altitude with Mobile First
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A walk through Skyscanner's recent history, why we went 'mobile first', and what we've been able to do as a result.
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Reaching Altitude with Mobile First
- 1. Reaching Velocity David Low Developer Advocate
- 2. Introduction
- 3. Skyscanner and Mobile First
- 4. The shifting market 77% growth In mobile users
- 5. Korea: 74% mobile Internet usage The shifting market
- 6. The shifting market India: mobile only – more revenue
- 7. The shifting market 2G connections drive ‘lite’ products
- 8. What is Mobile? Mobile phone?Laptop with poor connection?Newspaper guy?
- 9. What’s in a phone?
- 10. Context
- 11. The Mobile Mind Shift Marc Smith / Flickr
- 12. Mobile Moments
- 14. Lean on the platform Platforms and OSs Provides guidelines and expectations Standard Components Already provide useful, tested ways to do things and ongoing support 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
- 15. Think small
- 16. 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
- 17. Work back to go forwards
- 18. A world of possibilities
- 20. 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 youbusiness.skyscanner.net @skyscannertools
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon - it’s a pleasure to spend a few minutes today talking about our experience of mobile at Skyscanner, and how building good foundations for mobile users, puts you in a good place to deal with some much bigger possibilities.
- A while ago now, we made the choice to be a product led, mobile first business. Not a strategy in itself, but basic assumptions and accelerators that underpin day-to-day and longer term development. It’s important to understand what we mean by ‘mobile first’ though. For us it’s partly a behaviour shift to think differently about our users and how they want to use digital products like Skyscanner. But it’s also about architecture, engineering and product development - and how to prepare yourself for a new world every few months.
- In 2014 alone, we saw a 77% growth in usage of our products on mobile devices - not a particularly new trend but one we spotted early and one that isn’t going away. In many of the markets we deal with, mobile is already by far and away the primary source of users - in more emerging markets, desktop is almost unheard of as a consumer platform.
- In 2014 alone, we saw a 77% growth in usage of our products on mobile devices - not a particularly new trend but one we spotted early and one that isn’t going away. In many of the markets we deal with, mobile is already by far and away the primary source of users - in more emerging markets, desktop is almost unheard of as a consumer platform. But nothing stands still and just as mobile becomes dominant, platforms within and above mobile - such as messaging - are starting to take hold too.
- 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?
- 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’.
- 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 it if you know what you’re doing, it shouldn’t be luck if that happens.
- Flashmobs are really the most primitive ‘mobile moment but there are other more practical examples.
- 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. 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’ve been calling “degrade to desktop”.
- And it’s not an easy thing to get right - but in principle, you grow big by thinking small. Break down a product to its component parts, and only display the pieces and options relevant at the time. 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.
- Taking it further … if you suspect most people looking for a hotel need it that night, why show them a calendar control? Make that an opt-in and start with tonight’s prices. Offer a notification if prices are likely to get better, send it when they’re most likely to fear missing out. Hotel Tonight, as you see there, is a mobile-only product. It leans heavily on very low friction and real-time notification. It’s just moved into geographic pricing – offering better prices if you’re in the vicinity and likely to book. This type of product relies on microservices grabbing small pieces of data for particular puroses. Those are ideal building blocks for modern low-friction products - voice, messaging, wearables or IoT.
- Having got that far, you should be able to take your side of a mobile moment, and deliver it almost anywhere. The good people at Forrester Research, describe how to enable all this through a ‘four-tier architecture’ which puts it very well: 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
- If you think about it that way, previous responses to mobile such as m.dot sites, responsive and adaptive, are lucky if they deliver one or two of those tiers. You need to work your way back from the mobile moment and that fragment of expectation, all the way down your application structure - to the point you can deliver that moment’s worth of information quickly and efficiently. By starting small, you’ll find you can scale to the billions of devices and end points you can address.
- At Skyscanner we’ve adapted our platform from things as simple as presenting price changes within Google Now, to a watch app that directs you back to your hotel in a strange place, to full blown branded service for MSN users and many others. Lots of variations, big and small - based on the same underlying platform, and a variation on that four-tier architecture – trying to solve difficult problems in the smallest of use cases.
- …and that, is how we want to enable velocity. Thank you very much.