Fine-tuning TuneHotels.com
January 30th, 2008
Upon landing in Kuala Lumpur, my French friends who just came back from Cambodia are looking for a place to unpack their luggage and quick rest. They wanted some place near the heart of the city. With their budget and location preferences in mind, I decided to bring them over to Tune Hotels. Furthermore, I’ve always wanted to see how the “Booking” system works in Asia’s 1st No Frill Hotel.
Upon reaching the nearest computer terminal en route Tune Hotels, which “co-incidentally” happened to be my office, I finally got the chance to look at how the whole booking process works. The entire booking process is performed “live” by my friends. Bear in mind that this “live performance” is purely executed from the point of a non-English speaking user.
Bigger input fields and making the Booking Now stood out prominently can mean a lot of difference. The rule is simple, important element should always stand out visually from the rest. In this case, it’s not the Login button.
Most visitors jump into the form without spending much time browsing the entire website. Obviously, the main conversion of the website is online booking, hence creating other pages such as “About Us”, “Corporate Information” and various hotel guest-unrelated information would be counter-productive. Instead, content that is important is build alongside the form structure. Notice in this example above, it would be difficult to explain in text how comfortable the mattress it. A picture speaks a thousand words.
However, after my friend finish filling up all the booking details, as he was proceeding to the credit card payment phase, he was annoyingly greeted with an obstrusive “Member Sign Up” form. This part of the process was not executed as elegantly as I expected. As a rule of thumb, never add unnecessary processes in between the starting point and the goal- always use the Shortest Path Algorithm.
You can always include the “Member Sign Up” phase in the confirmation e-mail later, which in my opinion is much more relevant. And one can’t help but feel that the UI designer decided to take the easy way out by putting 5 equally prominent red bullets for the “Login”, “Register”, “Email me my password”, and “Back”. Hard work doesn’t always pay off now, but laziness almost always pay off instantly. The user could have been guided better and faster with a better layout design.
Lost in translation! Yup, Tune Hotels lost RM 5 just because some of the items listed in the website is not easily understood and was easily pass over by my friend. The word ‘Towel’ which is written only in English proves to be a headache for my friends who could have mistaken it as sanitary napkins. An icon would have done the job much better!
You may want to take a look at our related postsTruly first come first serve system must be discriminative!
January 26th, 2008
Over the counter, banks use queue ticket system to manage their crowd.
However, as with human nature, not all counters can solve each customer’s request in the same time duration.
Incorrect form entries, forgetting a company stamp, signature mismatch, and all other kinds of human-prone errors are bound to happen! This is where the queue system cannot easily filter out, making it half as efficient as it should have been.
To fix this little margin of “humanity-error”, we have implemented an “approval-based system”.
It’s quite simple really. The approval process kicks in the moment the first customer start queueing. The duty of the approval team will filter out the customers with problems and direct those who are error-free straight to the counter. Those with errors will be directed to the error-fixing team, where a dedicated trouble-shooting team will attend to them personally.
It’s not to be seen as a system to penalize customers with errors, but rather, it’s to reward well-prepared customers who gets their documents right and speed up the process for them.
In the end, both the erroneous customer and the error-free customer will be happy.
You may want to take a look at our related postsPrimanora Women’s Wellness Centre
January 24th, 2008
My first impression of Datuk Nor, she is really a passionate and friendly person. We was talking about the online marketing and how it can help driving more visitors to the newly setup Primanora Website today. The discussion is great, and do check back the website for latest promotion and offers.
The environment and setup of the centre is welcoming and great. It is located at Uptown, next to the Naza Car Showroom.
“For a long time, it has been my mission in life to uplift the standards of women’s health. Primanora Women’s Wellness Centre represents the realisation of this dream so that women can have a better quality of life throughout their lifespan. Our care is focused on the uniqueness of a woman’s healthcare needs. It is all that we do, and we believe in doing it well with passion,” said Datuk Dr. Nor Ashikin Mokhtar.
Primanora is a private centre, based on the principles of high quality, effective and integrated health care provision, which will facilitate empowerment, choice and action for women.
You may want to take a look at our related postsFor the first time in their life…
January 22nd, 2008
“More children in Cambodia can now attend schools for the first time in their life”
We believe that the Kumomo Tree is having this magical power of healing anyone sitting under it. It is this reason that drives us to create Kumomo.com, an advertisement booking platform which contributes to the Rural School Project on every successful booking.
By giving out the ownership of the domain name Kumomo.com, 26k USD was raised to build two schools in Cambodia. When asked, we have decided to name both new schools Kumomo Tree One & Two! Construction is expected to begin in mid February and should be completed in July 2008.
For the first time in my life too, I felt the magical power, so real and it is happening…
We need your help! We wish to upgrade both school with Internet access. With this, kids can access to the outside world, as well as to support the Girls Be Ambitious program.
If you have any extra stationery which you wish to donate to both schools, please send it to us (J-2-15, Jalan PJU 1/43, Aman Suria, PJ 47301, Selangor) before July 2008. Thank you so much!
You may want to take a look at our related postsGiant Supermarket sells Spam
January 22nd, 2008
No, not the canned meat product! This is the 5th Spam mails I have received from Malaysia Giant Supermarket through I have requested them to unsubscribe me from the their list. Guess their marketing team is really doing a good job to have a short email that go through most Spam filtering system!
Clearly, the result of conversion is, this was featured in my Blog for a wider marketing reach!
You may want to take a look at our related postsThe broken chair
January 19th, 2008
“Keep it in the store room first!”
You have a nice office chair that is broken. It can be fixed by replacing the circular plate beneath. New chair costs RM120 while fixing it costs you RM70. Most of us don’t throw it away or buy a new one because you know that the-lying-in-the-store-room broken chair can be fixed.
Making immediate decision is painful, so as making a change. Both explore a new possibility unknown. You can stay in your comfort zone by making no decision or change - will a comfort zone remains comfort without change, I doubt!
Your call to add a new junk worth RM50 to the earth, or to call BinChen for her help to fix your chair!
You may want to take a look at our related postsNew year, chinese ancient art of change
January 19th, 2008
In many Chinese homes, the annual housecleaning is still done at New Year’s time. It is the Chinese way of sending out the old year and welcoming in the New Year. It gives you, at very least, no excuse for a change every year!
One of our project management practise was to keep all document related to a web development project in those hardcover folder. This is a decision made (by me), two years ago! Just in case, we need them someday - or never!
It happens to be never. So, we decided to throw it away. They are noice, they take up resources from our project managers to sort them out. Business change, and we are now focusing in only few projects! Ideally, we want to go greener and faster!
New table alignment, hair cut, shortcut to the office, are painful changes. Let’s see how much we gain from this change…
First, we empty all the shelves. We kept papers with only single-sided printed for reuse purpose. The rest of papers are donated to a charity organization who can come and pick up from your office regularly.
The result, one empty shelves, 5 rims of reused A4s, getting-to-know the contact of the charitable pick up service (call 03-79811320 if you have a change too. Sorry, I can’t recall their name).
Yes, another 10 extra PCs, 3 extra hubs, cables, 8 power adapters, bigger office space, power saving…
Plus a new playground (combined four tables by removing 8 legs) to have fun and meeting for our upcoming new projects!
You may want to take a look at our related postsDon’t make a choice
January 10th, 2008
The less choice for your site visitors, the higher the conversion!
Upon landing on your website, your visitors are expecting that you, the site owner is making the best arrangement for them. Just like how we trust Google. You believe Google returned the MOST relevant result to you, don’t you? Or at least, the is the best Google can provide to you.
But still, many websites are designed to give you the choices of you don’t want. Do you buy Cambodia and Bahrain travel guide at the same time? If not, why shopping cart are provided? Yes, it gives you the convenience of shopping around, but it also creates more steps to complete a deal.
The tricky part (it is nothing but test & measure), it is how you divert them to their choice before they make a choice! The best is, this is done indirectly, without their awareness. You won’t be pleased to be asked for your shoe size immediately when entering a boutique…
Cambodie e-Visa allows travelers to apply their Travel Visa to Cambodia. If the applications come from travelers themeselves, chances that the’re applying for no more than 5 applications at a time. The first part of the application form was designed to filter the applicants and provide them with the best experience while submitting their details.
The use of icons immediately telling the applicants the total price before the last step. Icons use no translation and no shopping cart is required!
You may want to take a look at our related postsScrew
January 9th, 2008
My Sony notebook, loose with one screw missing. A tiny screw cost nothing but I will never go to a Sony support centre and fix it, or order it somewhere. Why? Because I am lazy. If someone come to me and offer this to me with RM1 for one screw. I will take it, simply because it comes to me, at the right time, right place.
Shopping centre provides convenience to us. Everything are in one plaze. That is one way of fighting the laziness.
Another way, if Sony website or their support centre make known to me that I can order a screw through their website, I will do it too.
Laziness - it is a curse to online business offering items with small values.
You may want to take a look at our related postsTerry Fox Run KL: RM282,081.92 raised
January 9th, 2008
Last year, Terry Fox Run KL 2007 raised a total of RM282,081.92 through the runs and donations.
The Terry Fox Run KL Blog attracts about 12k visitors last year. It is pointing to the main Terry Fox foundation’s website at the moment!
You may want to take a look at our related postsCost of Acquisition
January 8th, 2008
You are offering an online service. You know that visitors from search engines and other online sources are most likely to be converted into your customer than those coming from offline medias such as newspaper or TV commercial.
Rasa Sayang Malaysia calls out to all Malaysians to share the wonders of our country with the world by sending an online postcard. I have yet to see any Asian people to write on a postcard while waiting for the flight in the airport, foreigners do. Why not targeting at those backpackers who travel to Malaysia to logon to the website and send the postcard? Isn’t that they have more friends who eager to know about Malaysia than our friends? Yet, their commercials appear on local TV channel, and one need to register before even given the chance to look at what are those postcard available…
Mobile Wallet, choose to advertise with full page coverage in today’s newspaper. The cost of acquisition for the conversion to take place is high. If, this is so-called part of the branding process, it is not measurable, and it definitely not a conversion. Search engines and other online channels are going to drive in more than 80% of their website traffic, in a more targetted and measurable way. Only, with a fraction of offline marketing fee can do much to the current website…
You may want to take a look at our related postsImportance of Keeping Your Renewal Records
January 8th, 2008
Who say running an online business is easy and everything seems to be auto-pilot - one just need to get the site running and start collecting money.
Email - Reliable, Manageable (forwarding, Spam Control), uptime. How marketing experience shares between your teams, solving customer support email while using it as an opportunity to train new support staff and at the same time to reduce operation issues…
Servers - Dedicated server, higher bandwidth, importance of understing every details of the platform including what is running in the Cron job, who is deleting the overflow log file, blocking the firewall, making sure the current datetime is correct and sync to the hardware clock, etc.
Domain name - Reminder to renew your domain name? Or, end up as the recent incident that caused the Advertlets.com domain to expire?
You may want to take a look at our related postsIsolationism
January 7th, 2008
“China - after the Zheng He voyages in the 15th century, the foreign policy of the Ming Dynasty in China became increasingly isolationist. The Qing Dynasty that came after the Ming often continued the later Ming Dynasty’s isolationist policies. Around the 1500’s China began isolationism. One reason China decided on this was to keep out as much foreign influence on religious beliefs as possible, especially from European traders who came into China with Christian missionaries…”
If we are too focus to be on our own online business and stop taking projects from other customers, we will end up to be second Ming Dynasty in China!
You may want to take a look at our related postsPassing traffic
January 3rd, 2008
Online business is about passing traffic from website to website. It is one of the reason why YouTube was acquired! Example of how AirAsia expands and monetizes from their traffic (ignore sequence)!
AirAsia -> Snack Attack -> GoInsure -> Xpress Boarding -> AirAsia X -> AirAsia Games -> Tune Money -> Tune Hotels -> ??
You may want to take a look at our related postsSource of visitors
January 3rd, 2008
Yes, this is an online business. If you are depending heavily on offline marketing to drive in visitors to your online business (unless you have already some establish offline business, and online is just an extention), you are probably hitting at the wrong target user-base.
In quick, sources of visitors can be broken down to Search Engine, Referral and Direct. Clicks from search engines of both Sponsored & free listing are one of the major source which you can never neglected. Referral is visitors landed at your website by clicking on any hyperlink that points to you, EXCEPT search engines. The hyperlink, can be in an email, from a Blog, from a banner, etc. Direct refers to those who type your URL in the web browsers.
Knowing where is your customers helps you to better plan your campaign!
You may want to take a look at our related postsDay dreaming…
January 2nd, 2008
If a Blog attracts 100 visitors a day - I need 4,000 Blogs to attract 400,000 visitors a day. If I am doing good enough to convert 10% of visitors into something, that would be about 40,000 successful conversion a day… day dreaming?
You may want to take a look at our related postsDecide or Wet
January 1st, 2008
“You are on your half way to school, and rain starts to fall down. Here comes to a decision to be made. Either to rush back and get yourself a umbrella or sprint your way to school”
Puzzling? It is about decision, making the best decision at at the most right time!
Your online business just started. You have average 20 visitors a day. 2 out of 20 sign up for your online service. Well, you have just got yourself 10% conversion rate daily!
The two important measurement in this case, are Visitors and Conversion rate.
If you can increase Visitors to 40 a day - quite likely you are getting 4 successful sign up a day. Same goes to the conversion rate!
You post a comment in someone’s Blog with a link pointing back to your website. Yes, you drive more visitors but it does not increase your conversion rate. In another senario, you post some recent testimonials on your website, and this increase your conversion rate, but has nothing to do to drive in more Visitors.
Let’s make thing simple, if you have less than 100 visitors a day! Let’s see why we should focus in driving more Visitors first and only deal with Converision Rate later?
1. Without certain amount of Visitors, it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of a change to your website for the sake of conversion rate!
2. You want to have shopping cart system, royalty program, membership login, etc. Let’s be true. Your website is new, you need visitors. You need their feedback to shape the features of your website. Shopping cart make buyers’ life easier (though we can also prove to you that not all your potentials know how to use a shopping cart, I will explain in future). No one come to your website because you have a shopping cart!
3. The more time you have spent in improving conversion rate, the less time you have to drive in more visitors!
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