TECHNOLOGY UPDATE

Today’s Technology Update is brought to you by Excite Holidays Tramada Systems Pty. Ltd.

True innovation comes from outside the boardroom

This week Uber launched a new product feature; when your driver is approached, a button appears which will turn the screen of your phone into a bright colour, and notify the driver to look out for that colour. All you need to do is simply hold your phone out. This is simple, but offers up a big thought about innovation: not all innovation and product development comes from a boardroom; often the best innovation just improves an existing user behaviour. In the case of Uber, they recognised that people were already using their phone to hail their driver, and they just made it slightly better.

Your customers are your best innovators, using your technology in ways that weren’t conceived in a boardroom. It pays to embrace this. We’ve experienced this with our hotel filter, originally built to allow agents to quickly filter by a hotel chain by typing the name into a field. What we didn’t anticipate was that this same filter would also be valuable for finding other property types, like allinclusive, bed and breakfasts, and even castles and ryokans. Our communication around this feature changed completely, as we saw that it was far more powerful than we had originally planned.

Whether it’s the colour of a phone screen, or a simple search term, it pays to listen to your customers, because they are your true innovation department.