constructing the hautelook mobile experience
TRANSCRIPT
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8/2/2019 Constructing the HauteLook Mobile Experience
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Constructing TheHauteLook
Mobile Experience
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CTO of HauteLook
Oversee all custom applications built in-house and out
Major focus on customer experience based applications
Utilize Agile SCRUM and Lean Kanban SDLC
Build web apps for Desktop, Mobile and Tablet (from here out I will referto Mobile as inclusive of tablets)
Build native applications for iPhone, iPad and Android
Who am I? Kevin Diamond
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Private sale, members-only limited-time sale events
Premium fashion and lifestyle brands at exclusive prices of 50-75% off
Over 20 new sale events begin each morning at 8am PST
Over 8 million active members
Acquired by Nordstrom in 2011 Increased sales by over 60% in 2011 and on pace to do the same in 2012
Who is HauteLook
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Small
Slow
Hard
Confusing Fragmented
But its also
Growing
Powerful
CAN be a big sales generator for your business
Mobile Is
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iPhone (Oct 2010), iPad and Android(Sep 2011) apps now available, with
experience tailored to each device
Over 700,000 app downloads
Mobile now represents up to 25% of
weekday logins and 35% on weekends Mobile now represents up to 20% of
weekday revenue and close to 30% on
weekends
Sometimes our core member prefers
using her phone to shop HauteLook,even when near a computer
HauteLook Mobile Is
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Measure everything before and after
Outsource first if unsure of market, but know insourcing it later is hard,
costly, time consuming
Speed and performance are crucial for customers to use your device
UI is a must for getting the smaller platform right
Building for mobile is a lot harder than building for desktop, so hire
appropriately. Testing is MUCH harder.
If you can, go Mobile First
Key Points
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First thing we measured is what operating systems our members use HauteLook decided to build for iOS native app and a generic Mobile
website first
Why? Because thats where our members were
Measuring Before
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Windows
Mac
iOS
Android
Other
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iOS is inclusive of both iPhone and iPad
But, Very different use behavior
iPhone usage is primarily on-the-go Which is great for us since our sale events begin at 8am
iPad usage is primarily on the sofa or over the weekends
iPad provides a much larger screen space, and our website looked great on
it
So really, iPhone was what we needed first
iPhone vs. iPad
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We now had decided what apps we were going to build,
iPhone native app and a generic mobile website
We found the pool of outsource agencies for mobile development are
mixed (at best), and you will pay a premium because its the HOT new
thing
Outsourcers will almost always reuse code for many applications, so
rarely the best approach for your specific app
Even with outsourcing much of the work was still on us:
We had to fully manage the project to stay on schedule/budget
We had to do much of the testing
We had to build all of the webservices/APIs for the thing to work
In-house vs. Outsource
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We chose to outsource our first version
because we had no expertise in-house
We had a great experience with the outsourcer building our mobile web
app
A far less than desirable experience with the iPhone build (Based on our
vendor, not the platform in general)
We built in-house our v1 API which was used by both
Outsourced First
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We saw great success with our initial launch
Determined mobile was Strategic for our business
So we decided to hire the RIGHT people and bring development in-
house after the initial release
We also decided this was the time to build for iPad as well
There is still a big learning curve
Performance issues are hard to know/handle/find
So much can go wrong from a dropped connection
We had to hire Dev, QA and UI people who knew mobile development
But, we found the v1 of the code done outside was going to be almostentirely replaced
Odd proprietary or third party libraries reused for odd purposes
No clear understanding of transactional application models
Poor error handling
Now Were In-house
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Memory Management, Small Processors, Dropped Connections, Speed
Constraints, were all new problems
Understanding standards of the device platform and how to appropriately
use those requires a good UI/UX person
Simplicity is key for a successful experience, almost opposite from the
desktop web
Need APIs that bring all major functionality to the new platform, so
double the building for all new functionality
Building Native Apps is Hard
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The rest of your team needs to become dedicated to maintaining your
APIs and their up-time (hard if nothing else uses them)
Testing must be extreme, takes weeks not minutes to get new
releases out to all customers, so bugs are very costly
Beta test internally with employees to find bugs the average person
might see, but your developers will miss
Beta testing internally is not easy to get the app on to peoples
devices, often have to use tools like TestFlight
If development isnt in-sync, new features will come to desktop web
first, and later to your app which requires a lot more communicationinternally and externally
What versions of what devices will you support? (iOS 4+, Android
2.0+, Touch-based Smartphones, etc)
Supporting Native Apps is Harder
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Everyone was building Android apps
So, we decided we would build an Android app
Pretty much a mistake (for us)
Market share of our members who had Android MUCH lower than
iOS, but still higher than anything else Found the $/Login similar between members
BUT they dont download and use apps nearly as much
Lesson learned. We build native only for iOS and then a generic
Mobile Web for everyone else.
So what about Android?
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We defined success as growing usage by members
Both logins and sales as absolute and as a percentage
Measuring marginal increase in sales due to mobile apps is hard and
rarely accurate
We figured an increase would come as we transitioned traffic
So first we measured both logins and percent of sales on mobile
Measuring Constantly
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Q3/2010 Q4/2010 Q1/2011 Q2/2011 Q3/2011 Q4/2011
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Next we needed to know if Mobile was really working So we compared the conversion on mobile vs. desktiop
But we quickly learned some people START a purchase on mobile, but
complete it on the desktop
We assume these count towards mobile since without it the process
would never have started
Measuring More
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Q3/2010 Q4/2010 Q1/2011 Q2/2011 Q3/2011 Q4/2011
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We measure analytics on every event We measure the performance of the app
Use Google Analytics for all of this
Measuring Even More
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Very public reporting of all issues people have with the app Also people will evaluate your business
Business Practices
Business Model
No way to contact or respond to complaints, even if its with a fix
No way to identify the user to look internally at what problem they might
have had
App Store Reviews
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Push messages are to mobile as email is to the desktop But device tokens expire quickly (think constantly changing email
addresses)
Lots of moving parts to get them to work right
Much harder to send in bulk
Overall more finicky and harder to manage
Very limited in size of message
Notifications
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All features we build are built into our versioned APIs
All applications (desktop web to admin tools to iOS) must use the APIs
only, meaning our APIs must always work We combined codebases for all web (desktop and mobile) which requires
much less maintenance and just independent view layers
If you can solve a display problem on mobile, you can solve it anywhere,
provided a much better user experience overall
If you can build something that performs well on mobile, it will scream onthe desktop
What now? Mobile First!
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Improving iPad Browser experience with touch-specific features of our
desktop web
Building a touch-specific HTML5 mobile web experience
Going to try wrapping the above HTML5 in a native app via PhoneGap
(wish us luck!) to get into Windows, Blackberry App stores
Whats next?
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Measure everything before and after Outsource first if unsure of market, but know insourcing it later is hard,
costly, time consuming
Speed and performance are crucial for customers to use your device
UI is a must for getting the smaller platform right
Building for mobile is a lot harder than building for desktop, so hire
appropriately. Testing is MUCH harder.
If you can, go Mobile First
The Recap
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Thanks for taking the time with me today If you have questions, please email me
Suggested reading:
Head First Mobile Web
byLyza Gardner & Jason Grigbsy
Thank you!
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