Use Case: Engage the spontaneous, last-minute mobile traveler using the contextual, local capabilities of Wearables.
Solution: Create a geofence surrounding the hotel for every hotel booking, and use it to trigger our watch app when a user enters that location. The slick watch UI displays an interactive map of suggested, local convenience stores, ATMs and other POIs where a spontaneous traveler can pick up forgotten items, like a toothbrush or phone charger.
Results: Awarded Google Play Top Developer Badge, featured in Google Play "What's Hot" section and received press accolades for adding "something new to the crowded travel app sector."
Problem statement: Google recently reported that mobile users have an average of 36 apps installed on their phones yet 25% of them are unused. App developers increasingly need solutions to re-engage and remind inactive customers that they have their app installed.
Solution: Run MVP that implements app indexing APIs to expose primary app screen content, making it crawlable and discoverable in Google mobile search results.
Results: Priceline customers with the app installed are able to open results directly in the app when performing a mobile search.* Our MVP indexing--of just three screens--resulted in new, quantifiable percentage of organic traffic driving app opens.
*when searching for search terms for which Priceline ranks
Problem statement: Due to constraints from our supply partners, when shopping for Priceline Express Deal hotels, our customers can see the vicinity of the hotel, but the precise hotel address is not revealed until after the sale. We had to ensure that, while shopping, our customers understood the neighborhood in which their hotel would be located.
Solution: We needed to provide context about the hotel location at the most relevant moment in the UX to reduce cognitive load and allow the customer to compare hotel zones. To do this, we animated and zoomed into to specific areas in the location map to demonstrate exactly where the hotel zone is in relation to the searched city center.
Results: We saw a 10% increase in usage of maps, 4.25% improvement in booking conversions for Express Deal hotels and a marked reduction in customer calls about hotel location confusion.
Problem statement: Customers who prefer the ease of booking travel on web over installing an app need contextual and immersive native features to encourage them to use loyalty-driving mobile apps.
Solution: To encourage customers to use native apps for post-booking experiences and support, we started by solving for the most expected feature, using push notifications to deliver receipts for Priceline travel booked on any platform (web or apps).
Results: Opting customers into expected and highly-contextual notification content kept unsubscribe rates at low single-digit percentage, and over a third of customers who click through to view notification content on the apps were, in fact, those who booked their itinerary on a web platform.
This successful version 1.0 served as our baseline for a re-engagement strategy to deliver contextual notifications for behaviorally-defined audience segments.
Contextual filtering: I'm leading experimentation using animations at contextual moments to enable users to reorganize large groups of data with less upfront cognitive load.
Learned listings: I'm also working on moving from the delivery of a firehose of results to a smart hotel results list. The list takes contextual mobile signals--such as time of day, proximity to hotel, and weather--into account to return highly-targeted, local search results while storing structured data around elections to learn and adapt results for individual users.
