There was a problem on Expedia where a lot of people were choosing their itinerary, entering their information and then dropping off after they clicked on the Buy Now button. It's like getting to the cash register at a store, and the cashier says they can't take your money.
So analysts took a look and found that the field to enter your company was confusing people, leading to the input of an incorrect address. "After we realised that we just went onto the site and deleted that field — overnight there was a step function [change], resulting in $12m of profit a year, simply by deleting a field."
Not bad for a little bit of data digging. I hope the analysts got a bonus.
That said, not every decision has to be driven by data. Balance is good.
In this case, wasn’t it an error that should have been detected during normal user testing? I’m all for data driven analysis, but if they had done more user testing they probably would have noticed that they got confused at that step before “gaining” an extra $12m a year by finding it later.
True, but bottom line, the mistake was made, as they often are, and someone was able to find it after the fact.
You took the words right outta my mouth hung. gonna post about this on my blog. humansindesign.tumblr.com
seems strange since when mantaining a big website it’s usual to take many actions of continuous improvement,i bet there are multiple causes for that 12 mil. Anyway it’s a nice fairytale to tell to my grand children ;)
yet another stupid big corporation website filled with errors