Back to the future, we know what you’re doing
Line BreakAuthor: Mark Ellison (8 Articles)
Mark is the Project Manager at Travelfusion. Originally from the United States, Mark joined the company in 2006. You can find his full biography here.
We had a pretty big milestone yesterday. In addition to some crucial changes for the Travelfusion China website, we’ve successfully deployed two hugely important features.
Back button support
Before, when you clicked your browser’s back button expecting the see your previous results set immediately, it would not happen. You will instead be forced to sit through another 30 second search. This killed us on usability points and led to much frustration.
Now, when you click the back button, you immediately get your previous results set as if you were using a purely static website! Users will now happily know that they can try anything and always be saved by a click on the back button to return to the previous page.
The feature Ana developed has opened up some more doors for us as well. You can now copy the URL of the results page, share it with a friend, and they’ll see the exact results set that you see without waiting through a 30 second search.
Event tracking
The past two years we have had many debates over the value of certain features. How many people use the checkbox filters? What’s the ideal number of results on the page? Are slider filters actually useful? How many rows do users look at before doing a drop-in? How many drop-ins do users do in a single session? These are all very good questions, and we’ve argued and debated each one to death, but we still have not been able to answer them – until now!
With event tracking implemented, every single user action is tracked on Google Analytics. As our user base grows and we accumulate statistics, we’ll be able to make informed decisions on all of the above questions. We’ll know if sliders are being used or if they scare users away. We’ll know which filters are the most popular. We’ll know which filters are never used and should therefore be removed, freeing up space for more useful things. It’s all about intelligent, informed decision making, something we have never truly done at this level of precision.
The next development cycle will be focused on building up additional functionalities, and a LOT of time is going into offline design work for the next version of the user interface. The team is also putting together a comprehensive Traffic Generation Strategy document which will encompass online communications, search engine marketing, style and brand standards, and web development.
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Line BreakAuthor: Mark Ellison (8 Articles)
Mark is the Project Manager at Travelfusion. Originally from the United States, Mark joined the company in 2006. You can find his full biography here.
