Akihiko Ito's Profile

Thanks Will for your comment! To your first point, TripAdvisor has a review guideline and rejects reviews which do not meet that criteria (lack of details, bad language, inappropriate content, etc.) so that it maintains high quality content. How to show helpful reviews is an important point of user experience design. The company uses various criteria to surface helpful reviews up to the front (i.e. Amazon does a good job on this point).

I understand your concern that many tests may confuse users. This is actually true. Especially when we implemented a large interface changes, major metrics decline in many cases because existing users are confused. So, what we focused on was to accumulate small changes and improve metrics on a weekly basis. Major interface changes are not often: let’s say every quarter or every half a year.

Hi Dan! Yes, I actually ran one project to solicit customers’ feedback by using UserReport. http://www.userreport.com/
We collaborated with the company and solicited feedback on our desktop and mobile site at first with a 10% of traffic, then rolled out the feature for weeks until we got enough volume. One interesting finding was that some customer needs are universal across sites. i.e. people love to see how their reviews are evaluated “helpful” by other travelers. We tweaked our review functionality based on that feedback.

Hi Shimon, thanks for the comment! Yes, that is one of the challenges I faced at TripAdvisor. For example, Hebrew is a unique right to left language, which tends to cause issues if we only care about left to right languages. In order to prevent such issues, we developed preemptive measures for potential errors. Actually, I was a guy who managed non-English site quality projects. Love to talk about them if you are interested!

Thanks Carolina! Yes, I agree that TripAdvisor becomes more competitive as they have more content. Community management is one of key operations at TripAdvisor to maintain collaborative environment. The company has dedicated resources for that purpose.

Holacracy is an interesting concept. It sounds similar to Valve’s case. Is the structural change only reason causing the loss of 14% of the workforce or Zappos simply intended to restructure its workforce by renaming it “implementing Holacracy”? Interesting to see how this change affects Zappos’s performance.

Thanks Aparajita. This is a good summary of Amazon’s strategy! What’s interesting about Amazon is the company is trying to beat real retail stores by keeping offering lower prices. The company launched a new functionality of reading barcodes and showing Amazon’s price. This makes showrooming much easier. I regarded this move as a message that Amazon keeps offering lower prices for a while to shift consumers’ real store purchases to online shopping.

Thanks Alex for sharing interesting Spotify’s organizational structure. Another interesting point about Spotify is its approach to building a product. Each squad is encouraged to create minimal viable products (MVP) first and test it in the market. Then, after seeing the result, the team builds features and adds improvements to its MVP.