Adventures in the Cloud - Engineering a better customer experience

1. Adventures in the cloud
Engineering a better customer experience
©2015 EXPEDIA | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

2. Welcome to my world

3. My colleagues
and I are
helping make it
easy for people
to get to all the
places they
want to go on
our planet.
2015

6. Our approach to innovation
Be scientific
Make it easy
Don’t be boring
Be better every single day

7. Case Study
Improving the customer site experience

8. We use 'User Research' to understand how people
shop for travel.
From the data, we can identify trends and
problems.
We then use the 'Scientific Method’ to enhance the
things that are working well to make them work
better, and to solve problems.
The Process

9. Picture from http://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/
User Research Methods

10. We call this: Test and Learn
So what did we try?

11. Hypothesis: Page load time impacts the
customer experience

12. We needed to move the dial on the perceived
load time of pages - we hypothesised
improvements in SEO, SEM and CX

13. There are two crucial speeds to consider
1. the speed of light and
2. speed of deployment

14. Hello Cloud

15. Cloud = Closer to Customer +
Fast to deploy new solutions

16. Closer to the customer

17. Pipeline image from https://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/ravello-arms-deutsche-telekom-demand-cloud-flexibility/
Workflow image from https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/features/deployment.html
An Automated Pipeline

18. With an automated pipeline, we made
some changes to the pages and compared
with an A/B test in order to learn what
happens in a control environment

19. Control Experiment
59 and 69 91 and 93

20. Experiment
Control
3.5 and 8.0 seconds
0.8 and 3.0 seconds

21. Control
Experiment

22. Control
Experiment

23. What we learnt…

24. SEO Metrics Change
Bounce Rate -22%
Click Through +10%
Conversion +6%
SEM Metrics Change
Bounce Rate -1.5%
Conversion +11%

25. As hypothesised:
Fast page load times convert better
Implying better customer experience and
transactional business benefit
Faster pages rank better in search engines
Delivering SEO benefits, and making our sites easier
to find in organic search

26. #winning

27. Just a hypothetical to consider
6% change on $1 billion = $60 million
Not bad for a 2 pizza team and a couple of
weeks work.

28. Takeaways

29. 1. Cloud + Automation = faster
deployment and improved CX
2. Do not assume you have the
answers, use the Scientific Method.
3. Inform your predictions with User
Research

30. My team and I are helping to revolutionise
travel through the power of technology
for a very important person..

31. You

32. Thank you
Scott J Horn - Expedia Engineering - @scottjhorn
Learn more at http://techblog.expedia.com

33. Appendix

34. Principle 1: Be scientific.
Get close to a problem, make observations, build and test a
hypothesis, and follow the data. Then do it all again. This removes
unintentional bias towards one solution or another and instead
prioritizes data. If we are consistently scientific, and move and test
and fail and learn quickly, we can iterate ourselves towards
breakthrough.
Utilizing the scientific method has expedited our testing capabilities
and changed our approach across the company. From branding to
SEO to mobile product to our cloud solution teams, each group is
implementing tests of varying sizes to understand what resonates
with travelers and why.

35. Principle 2: Make it easy.
Life is complex. Complexity can make travelers afraid. Travelers
frequently visit new places and are uncertain about what they will
experience when they land or walk into a hotel or go on an
excursion. We must make planning, booking, and enjoying travel as
easy as possible to be successful.
It sounds counter intuitive, but we know that taking a vacation can
be stressful. Our mutual responsibility is to make this process
simple for travelers. Planning should be inspiring. Booking should
be straightforward and instill a traveler with a sense of confidence
that she found the best trip at the best price available. Enjoying a
trip should be as simple as arriving and having clear guidance for
what’s next – whether it’s lounging by a poolside bar, hiking a
nearby trail, or exploring the local history.

36. Principle 3: Don’t be boring.
The world is distracted. We are competing for time among
consumers. The internet used to be about relevancy, but relevancy
is now table stakes. In order to succeed, you must be interesting.
We’ve entered an era where teens will have spent more time playing
online games than they’ve spent in a classroom. In fact, there’s a
recent trend evolving where teens are delaying getting their license
– in favor of texting.
This may sound silly, but when thinking about a group of teenagers
loading into a car, they are all on their phones and connecting with
others, whereas the person driving is out of the loop. This emphasis
on content means companies are competing for attention. In that
world, the most interesting information wins.

37. Principle 4: Be better every single day.
Make incremental changes. It’s hard to remember how you did
something last year, but you can easily remember how you did
something yesterday. So improve upon it. Learning is your friend
and failing is your friend – both teach you things. You can do some
really big things with small changes.
This applies to not only your personal being, but also the elements
you interact with or work on every day. Being a better manager,
building a slightly better product, driving with a bit more respect.
These simple changes create a significant impact over time.