Modified Interface on New Search

[kes601]

Has anybody else noticed that sometimes when you search for new availability (not modifying an existing reservation) the interface is sometimes a little different? The colors are slightly different and the "Update" button at the top (next to room type) is rounded instead of rectangular. It is more in line with the WDW website.

I can also tell coding has changed some. For those of you who know the Chrome Developer Tools trick to see how many rooms are available on any given night, this has changed slightly also. It is no longer "calendar-availability" you search for, it is "calendar-points".

 

[CraigInPA]

Disney uses an a/b UX testing system, which rotates colors and buttons in order to test where customers click. It's fairly common, and in use by ShopDisney, Target, and others. It's not supposed to rotate inside a session, but sometimes it does by mistake (or if you turn off cookies or have a VPN that's moving your "originating" IP address around). It's pretty much limited to buttons and style sheet elements, and is touted as being able to test ideas without coding changes.

About 10 years ago, one of my clients (a Fortune 25 company) experimented with one of these because one of the other parts of the company found that a particular shade of pink was the most tempting to users to click on, after using the technology to test like 25 different colors of a single button. While the technology worked for the other division, our visitor volume was so low that it took a month or longer to collect enough data to validate anything.

 

[kes601]

It's not just the colors and the buttons that are different and being tested though, it's the coding of the page as a whole (see my note about developer tools). It was the first time I'd seen a different interface on DVC so found it interesting. Will be curious if testing expands to more of the site.

In my opinion they shouldn't be testing anything on a subset of users, it could be the difference in getting a room and not getting a room.