Perseverance is the measure of your belief in yourself

Abhijeet Prakash, Associate Director - Product Management

 

 

Kaizen’s literal translation is: "continuous improvement." "It's a persistent desire to do better.” - Grit, Angela Duckworth

 

I have been reading a book called Grit, by Angela Duckworth. The basic premise of the author is that passion and perseverance trump talent and skill. She proves this hypothesis through several real-life examples and the study she has done over the past many years.

 

My team recently decided to dive deeper into understanding the various user behaviours and flows while booking flights. Through this exercise we noticed one interesting user behaviour: Users would change their travel dates or sometimes, the source or the destination to find a cheaper and/or a better flight. To do this, they had to go back to the search page. Now, we wanted to see if we could avoid this back and forth and reduce the number of clicks for the customer.

 

We also wanted to see how we could show a real comparison between flights on different dates or different airports to the customer easily. To do this, we decided to show these alternates on the search page so that the user could make the comparison on a single screen.

 

The engineering team worked hard to crack the right algorithm to get the best alternate flights. Data told us that domestic flight users were flexible for +-1 day and international flight users were flexible for +3 days. This was the level of detailing we had gone into, to ensure the final result is relevant to the user.

 

As we launched the feature, we knew it addressed a customer need, but listened carefully for feedback to make sure we were adding real value. We encountered a lot of customer issues. It seemed that in a lot of cases, the customer simply missed the information. I must say, this was a bit disheartening for me and the team. We had worked hard to make this happen, and yet something wasn’t right. Was this an experiment that simply hadn’t worked? 

 

We took this challenge to the design team. ‘How can we get customers to use this feature? What are we missing?’ The design team came up with multiple iterations and we finally cracked the perfect user interface where users could differentiate between these flights and at the same time, get to know its benefits.

 

For us, it was about perseverance. To persevere means to stick with it; to continue working hard even after experiencing difficulty or failure, and we did. Today, this feature has become one of the most loved and used feature of 2018 and also contributes to an overall of 5% of our daily segments.