Tags: booking

I got a text this morning at 9:40am. It was from the National Health Service, NHS. It said:

You are now eligible for your free NHS coronavirus vaccination. Please book online at https://www.nhs.uk/covid-vaccination or by calling 119. You will need to provide your name, date of birth and postcode. Your phone number has been obtained from your GP records.

Well, it looks like I timed turning fifty just right!

I typed that URL in on my laptop. It redirected to a somewhat longer URL. There’s a very clear call-to-action to “Book or manage your coronavirus vaccination.” On that page there’s very clear copy about who qualifies for vaccination. I clicked on the “Book my appointments” button.

From there, it’s a sequence of short forms, clearly labelled. Semantic accessible HTML, some CSS, and nothing more. If your browser doesn’t support JavaScript (or you’ve disabled it for privacy reasons), that won’t make any difference to your experience. This is the design system in action and it’s an absolute pleasure to experience.

I consider myself relatively tech-savvy so I’m probably not the best judge of the complexity of the booking system, but it certainly seemed to be as simple as possible (but no simpler). It feels like the principle of least power in action.

SMS to HTML (with a URL as the connective tissue between the two). And if those technologies aren’t available, there’s still a telephone number, and finally, a letter by post.

This experience reminded me of where the web really excels. It felt a bit like the web-driven outdoor dining I enjoyed last summer:

Telling people “You have to go to this website” …that seems reasonable. But telling people “You have to download this app” …that’s too much friction.

A native app would’ve been complete overkill. That may sound obvious, but it’s surprising how often the overkill option is the default.

Give me a URL—either by SMS or QR code or written down—and make sure that when I arrive at that URL, the barrier to entry is as low as possible.

Maybe I’ll never need to visit that URL again. In the case of the NHS, I hope I won’t need to visit again. I just need to get in, accomplish my task, and get out again. This is where the World Wide Web shines.

In five days time, I will get my first vaccine jab. I’m very thankful. Thank you to the NHS. Thank you to everyone who helped build the booking process. It’s beautiful.

The Trivago website is a progressive web app. That means it

1. is served over HTTPS,
2. has a web app manifest JSON file, and it
3. has a service worker script.

The service worker provides an opportunity for a nice bit of fun branding—if you lose your internet connection, the site provides a neat little maze game you can play. Cute!

That’s a fairly simple example of how service workers can enhance the user experience when the dreaded offline situation arises. But it strikes me that the travel industry is the perfect place to imagine other opportunities for offline enhancements.

Travel sites often provide itineraries—think airlines, trains, or hotels. The itineraries consist of places, times, and contact information. This is exactly the kind of information that you might find yourself trying to retrieve in an emergency situation, like maybe in a cab on the way to the airport or train station. Perhaps you’re stuck in traffic, in a tunnel. Or maybe you don’t have a data plan for the country you’re currently in. Either way, wouldn’t it be great if you could hit the website for your airline or hotel and get your itinerary, even if you’re offline.

Alright, let’s think this through…

Let’s assume that an individual itinerary has its own URL. That URL is a web page of information, mostly text, with perhaps an image or two (like a map). Now when you make your booking, let’s have the service worker cache that URL (and its assets) for offline access.

Hmm …but there’s a good chance that the device you make the booking on is not the same device that you’d have with you out and and about. Because caches are local to the browser, that’s a problem.

Okay, but of these kinds of sites have some kind of log-in mechanism. So we could update the log-in flow a bit: when a user logs in, check to see if they have any itineraries assigned to them, and if they do, fire off an event to the service worker (using postMessage) to cache the URLs of the itineraries.

Now that the itineraries are cached, the final step is to create a custom offline page. As well as the usual “Sorry, the internet’s down” message, we can say “Sorry, the internet’s down …but here are your itineraries”. (This is kind of like the pattern you see on blogs like mine, Ethan’s, or Mike’s—a custom offline page that lists cached URLs of articles you’ve previously visited).

That’s just one pattern off the top of my head. It’s fun to imagine the different ways that service workers could be used to enhance the experience of just about any site, but they seem particularly relevant to travel sites—dodgy internet connections and travelling go hand-in-hand. At Clearleft, we’ve been working with quite a few travel-related clients lately so that’s why these scenarios are on my mind: booking holidays, flights, and so on. But, as I’ve said before and I’ll say again, every website can benefit from becoming a progressive web app.

At Booking.com, they do a lot of A/B testing.

At Booking.com, they’ve got a lot of dark patterns.

I think there might be a connection.

A/B testing is a great way of finding out what happens when you introduce a change. But it can’t tell you why.

I used the site earlier in the year, and actually felt my heart rate increase. Never again.

— Paul Robert Lloyd (@paulrobertlloyd) October 24, 2017

The problem is that, in a data-driven environment, decisions ultimately come down to whether something works or not. But just because something works, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

If I were trying to convince you to buy a product, or use a service, one way I could accomplish that would be to literally put a gun to your head. It would work. Except it’s not exactly a good solution, is it? But if we were to judge by the numbers (100% of people threatened with a gun did what we wanted), it would appear to be the right solution.

When speaking about A/B testing at Booking.com, Stuart Frisby emphasised why it’s so central to their way of working:

One of the core principles of our organisation is that we want to be very customer-focused. And A/B testing is really a way for us to institutionalise that customer focus.

I’m not so sure. I think A/B testing is a way to institutionalise a focus on business goals—increasing sales, growth, conversion, and all of that. Now, ideally, those goals would align completely with the customer’s goals; happy customers should mean more sales …but more sales doesn’t necessarily mean happy customers. Using business metrics (sales, growth, conversion) as a proxy for customer satisfaction might not always work …and is clearly not the case with many of these kinds of sites. Whatever the company values might say, a company’s true focus is on whatever they’re measuring as success criteria. If that’s customer satisfaction, then the company is indeed customer-focused. But if the measurements are entirely about what works for sales and conversions, then that’s the real focus of the company.

I’m not saying A/B testing is bad—far from it! (although it can sometimes be taken to the extreme). I feel it’s best wielded in combination with usability testing with real users—seeing their faces, feeling their frustration, sharing their joy.

In short, I think that A/B testing needs to be counterbalanced. There should be some kind of mechanism for getting the answer to “why?” whenever A/B testing provides to the answer to “what?” In-person testing could be one way of providing that balance. Or it could be somebody’s job to always ask “why?” and determine if a solution is qualitatively—and not just quantitatively—good. (And if you look around at your company and don’t see anyone doing that, maybe that’s a role for you.)

Curious: How many large companies have an ethics board? Or some kind of moral advisory role employed?

— Erin Weigel (@endesignonline) November 2, 2017

If there really is a connection between having a data-driven culture of A/B testing, and a product that’s filled with dark patterns, then the disturbing conclusion is that dark patterns work …at least in the short term.