Page II: In an exclusive interview, the CTO of the UK travel portal says the open-source community provides better support than vendors such as IBM or BEA.
Is a lot of your job about managing the balance between the usability and the speed of the site?
We have lots of dynamic content and all that can add a lot to page-weight. We have this constant trade-off of how to make the site pretty and interactive but also responsive. So we're spending a lot of investment on a new generation of Web interfaces. Over the next few months we're looking to add a whole extra layer to the architecture. That will involve everything from better colours to better fonts and easier to use navigation.
Travel is a lot harder to build sites around than books. Books are static. With flights and hotels the price changes at different times and different intervals. And things can get sold out from under us, where as books don't usually get sold out from under you. Our problems are pretty difficult. So to give a really compelling user experience with recommendations and personalisation is really a hard problem in travel.
What parameters do you use to test the usability of the site -- are you using focus groups etc?
We actually hired Jakob Nielsen's consulting company. They did a study across the whole site and gave us a presentation of all their findings last week. Boy, was it great. It's very difficult internally to see that kind of stuff anymore; you get used to things, so to have this third party is great. They had a recommendation which we took to heart, which is we should do a lot of testing with real customers. You have got to have your customers give you real feedback.
I am actually pretty upbeat about the improvements. This is not a massive investment to make it look great -- why not? This is the biggest e-commerce site in Europe, what's bigger? I mean really, as far as people doing development here. I mean you've got the outposts of Amazon, Google, etc. but as far as transactional volume I think we're the biggest. So if it is just this much work too make the site look great competing against other US dot-coms then why don't we do it? Plus I think it does drive revenue.
Do you have to argue that in terms of funding - that any user interface improvements will have a sales comeback?
I don't think this is a big investment at all. I think this is in the course of normal work -- just following rules that are next generation design issues e.g. just using the right font so not everybody has to have perfect 20/20 vision.
Don't you think some conservative board members might think, "If it's not broke then why mess with it?"
I think you could get into that situation some day. Remember the cycle we are in now we are racing with two or three of our major competitors. Consequently in every product area we are improving the site so it's not much work to say "Guys, make sure you follow these basic human interface rules and make them the rules of the future".
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