lastminute.com energises
product discovery and development A new global mobile web platform was created by lastminute.com and ThoughtWorks in just 20 weeks, using a new “Innovation Engine” process that is customer focused through Continuous Design and Delivery. The release will form the basis for all future mobile web development for lastminute.com, Travelocity in the U.S. and Zuji.com in the Asia-Pacific region.
Highlights Ideas and Concepts - People add post-its, drawings or sketches to represent their proposal. Pitches are reviewed weekly by the product team and a number selected to progress further. Data insights - Selected ideas go to the analytics team, who gather customer and business data to evaluate the viability of the idea. Some ideas make it past this gate; some don’t. Prototype –The UX team starts to prototype the idea using various speed-enhancing techniques including sketching, HTML prototypes, sketch to code and/or implemented production code.
lastminute.com is a leading online hotel, travel and leisure provider across Europe specialising in providing opportunities for customers in the last minute window. Leveraging Travelocity’s worldwide flight, hotel booking and order processing services lastminute.com is continually developing new ways to communicate their offers in innovative ways. John Crosby, V.P. of Product & Technology, brought product management and software development together within one organisation to build a Lean and Agile “Innovation Engine” that could take ideas for new features and products, subject them to marketdriven tests, and use the fast and frequent user feedback to optimise them and bring the best to market as rapidly as possible. He invited ThoughtWorks as a partner to plan and implement the required organisational, process and technology changes. In just twenty weeks, the partnership transformed lastminute.com’s product discovery and development capability, demonstrated by the launch of a new Mobile First web platform that will eventually be used across the entire Travelocity Global organisation. “It was a truly transformational engagement driving agility and leanness not only in technology but also product management and the wider organisation,” says Crosby.
Test - The prototype is then presented to customers for user testing, guerrilla testing and general feedback. Validated – If the idea is proven and the prototype is validated, it is be picked up by the development team. At this point the software developers are already intimately familiar with the idea, prototypes and any issues surfaced in user tests; giving final product development a major head start.
Technology Java, Groovy, GRAILS, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS Puppet, Jasmine Jenkins, Maven
Continuous Discovery, Continuous Delivery The new product discovery and development flow is driven by a dedicated, multi-disciplined team bringing product ideation, customer behaviour analytics, marketing, user experience (UX) design and software development together in a rapid and collaborative effort. The process reduces the idea-to-market testing cycle from about eight weeks to a few weeks or even less. Informed by Lean principles, the process is democratic, and focused on delivering business value as fast as possible. Anyone in the business unit can contribute new product feature ideas; it’s as transparent a process as writing up the concept and sticking it on a wall in the product team room. The best ideas are given to analytics to evaluate by looking at current traffic, customer behaviour, and other business data. If viable, UX designers begin sketching, creating HTML prototypes, or working with developers using sketch-to-code prototyping. A prototype is very quickly available for user testing, guerrilla testing, and fast and frequent feedback.  On the delivery side, Continuous Delivery adds a level of testing, deployment automation and confidence that mitigates risk, and takes advantage of all the feedback from the discovery process.
Revving the Innovation Engine One of the first new ideas submitted was a “Hotels near me tonight” feature for mobile users of lastminute.com. The idea was supported by analytics showing that a large segment of lastminute.com customers booked hotels “just in time” – for the very night they were performing their searches. The product team approved moving to prototyping and market testing.
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This new feature gave the cross-disciplined team a chance to showcase the new working practices and processes. ThoughtWorks consultants with expertise in Agile and Continuous Delivery worked directly with lastminute.com product management and technical team members to bring it about. User experience designers, product managers and software developers began working literally side-by-side in a dedicated team room, so that critical product elements and design strategies were discussed and decided upon fast.
Mobile First design Mobile is increasingly becoming the primary way of accessing the internet, so it makes sense that mobile use should increasingly weigh into UX design. Upon consultation from ThoughtWorks, lastminute.com elected to build the new platform using Mobile First design. Mobile First is the idea that web sites should first be designed for mobile devices, with just the features that mobile website visitors use most. Then as screen real estate increases, functionality is progressively enhanced for optimisation on the device it is rendered on.
Building the capability to drive our “ innovation cycle time down and increase
the value delivered to our customers has energised not only our team but our whole product and technology organisation. David Slocombe, Head of Mobile
Fast projects rely on tools and processes designed for speed Techniques like sketch-to-code prototyping, rapid development languages, tools and practices including test-driven development, test automation, continuous integration, automated environment creation and virtualisation, and Continuous Delivery: all these and more were essential because they enabled everyone to work fast, without waste or extra steps. ThoughtWorks helped lastminute.com learn and use these techniques and tools so that within a few weeks customers were testing the first software prototypes. Personas, user-testing sessions, as well as guerilla testing (going out on the streets with prototypes and showing them to customers and gathering feedback) were all part of this effort. Eye-tracking software was part of the toolkit, so the designers could accurately see how different screen elements were recognised, and optimise placement of photos, prices, and other key elements that drive sales. Weekly user testing sessions were conducted in a newly built usability lab with over 80 customers in 16 weeks. The new Lean and Agile development processes enabled working software showcases and frequent user tests, while automated testing and deployments as a result of Continuous Delivery meant releases could be deployed in just eleven minutes.
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A new product, and new product development energy The team launched the Hotels Near Me mobile web feature in three months. That release was followed a month later by the successful launch of the new mobile-optimised platform, replacing the existing site for all of lastminute.com mobile web traffic. The projects have delivered value for customers, while giving lastminute.com a new “Innovation Engine” product development capability that can discover and deliver new ideas to market with far lower cycle time and greater confidence than before.
Benefits Delivered in just twenty weeks, the new platform will be the basis for all future mobile web development for lastminute.com in the U.K. and Europe, Travelocity in the U.S. and Zuji.com in the Asia-Pacific region. The new “Innovation Engine” product development capability discovers and delivers new ideas to market with far lower cycle time and greater confidence than before. The Mobile First design paradigm lets lastminute.com, Travelocity and Zuji.com tap into the fast-growing mobile-web channel for travel search and purchase, expected to grow at a double-digit rate and likely become the dominant revenue channel for the industry within the next three years.
Custom software experts ThoughtWorks – A company wholly devoted to the art and science of custom software. We make it, and we make our clients better at it. Our bottom line is to design and deliver software fast and predictably. Doing enterprise-scale software is tough, but the returns to those organisations that can deliver – on target – are tremendous. ThoughtWorks’ products division offers tools to manage the entire Agile development lifecycle through its Adaptive ALM solution™ comprised of Mingle®, Go™ and Twist®. ThoughtWorks employs 2,000 professionals to serve clients from offices in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. We lead the industry in rapid, reliable and efficient custom software development. When you need an expert partner to help you get ahead and stay ahead of the competition, get in touch.
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