Location Discovery and the Journey of Building Products Beyond Conversion

This is the journey to rebuild Expedia’s map and location discovery in a completely traveler-centric way. As a data-driven, test & learn company, we typically test into MVPs and continue to invest in iterations only where we’ve found significant impacts to conversion. We’ve anecdotally known our map experience has been dreadful for years but tests haven’t won. So how do you set a product vision for a hard-to-measure, harder-to-test in an MVP? After spending weeks focused solely on the problem, our UX team and I debated what 10 location questions travelers have that we should solve for. We constructed a thesis and built a Northstar for what the future Location Discovery experience could be. I’m eager to share how we broke down the problem, defined our thesis; and how we’ve had to evolve measuring the success of the product. It’s involved many failed tests and hypotheses, but it’s taught us a lot about what our customers are facing when using our site. And how we can build for them whilst ensuring the investment in the product is beneficial to Expedia.