Secret Escapes

Powerful Design, Driven on Data – Marvelapp

When was the last time you physically visited a travel agent? Probably a long time right? Thanks to the rise of the world wide web and the multitude of devices that now exist in our lives – going in store to book a holiday became completely irrelevant. Not only because you’re bound to find a better deal online but also thanks to the smooth user journey of booking online which makes us feel in control.

How a website changes, over 5 years – Sign up pages

Secret Escapes has now been running over 5 years. In that time it has changed dramatically; what was initially a small startup run out of a basement in Clerkenwell has now become a 250+ people organisation with websites and offices spanning Europe and the USA.

Staging Servers on Demand

As our team of developers and designers grew so did our need for having more staging servers available for testing new features.  With multiple teams working on multiple features, having just 2 or 3 available staging servers quickly became a problem, especially when some of these features required occupying a server for a couple of days. We needed a way for every developer to have a staging server “on demand”.

Crafting Pixels

Web design is a diverse field that changes quickly, and as web designers we have to adapt and improve our skills daily just to keep up.

Automating Release Notes

One of the cool things about working at Secret Escapes – apart from playing Fifa and FPS shooters over LAN – is we have a ‘hackday’ every other Friday, something other innovative companies like Netflix and Google do. We basically get a whole day to work on anything innovative for the company whether its fully automating our deployment process, creating a Google chrome extension plugin for the site, monitoring a users heart-rate with a FitBit to show them which sales got them most excited, making a Facebook game, or automating our release notes. Not all of the stuff we work on is incredibly fancy, but its refreshing and rewarding to have the freedom to work on anything we want.

A simple effort at personalisation

Personalisation is one of the things I really expect to blow up in 2015. With so much data lying around about our customers, and their behaviour, we now have a great opportunity to optimise their experience by providing more relevant sales and information. Personalisation can be as simple as adding a name to an email subject line, or it can be as complex as completely changing a user experience of a website.

Our CRO stack

Earlier in the month I read this great article by Justin Rondeau, on what CRO is and what it encompasses. The below graphic couldn’t sum it up any better.