We’re back at our desks ready to take on the new year along with all of the opportunities and challenges 2018 is sure to bring. 2017 was an exciting ride that we can’t help but reflect on as we start to think about what challenges and problems we want to help brands solve next.

Personalization and customer experiences have started to take the world by storm, as companies like Amazon and Airbnb are leading the experience revolution, charging with full force into 2018. Every other brand who knows what’s good for them has followed suit or at least thought about it.

2017 was full of inspiration and transformation as some of the leading brands started to bring the concept of personalized digital experiences to life. We’ve rounded up some of the most exemplary articles of this movement to help inspire your brand’s new year’s resolution.

Taplytics’ Top Posts

These are some of our most loved articles that help shine some light on the trends that surfaced in 2017 including A/B testing, customer feedback & learning from failure.

How Booking.com A/B Tests Like Nobody’s Business

Booking.com is one of the biggest advocates of A/B testing and experimentation cultures and has set the standard for iteration by running over 1000 experiments at any given time. Learn from the pros at Booking.com and get inspired to create an experimentation culture in your organization.

Why Snapchat is Failing and How It Can Do Better

This article examines why it’s important to always stay on your toes because technology trends and consumer demands are constantly changing and competition is fierce. When a giant like Instagram takes away one of your key value propositions, you have to be ready with the next big something to stay afloat. This post will help you learn from Snapchat’s mistakes and understand the importance of by experimenting, iterating, and learning from your customers.

Spotted! Spotify’s Multi-feature Rollout

This post was the second installation from our rollout series which also included an analysis of  Google Chrome. Companies love to use rollouts to ensure their feature or product releases are smooth by controlling which users get new updates first, measuring the feature’s immediate impact, and mitigating risk. These posts are helpful if you’d like to learn more about feature flagging and how some of the most successful companies are using it.

When Time is a Luxury, Validate Product Roadmaps With A/B Testing

Interviewing Deepa Subramaniam, Director of Product at Hillary For America, was one of the highlights of our year. In this interview, Deepa shares details of her team’s use of experimentation throughout Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Use this post to learn more about experimentation in a presidential campaign and how Secretary Clinton’s team created a data-driven culture.

The decision-making frameworks that help companies like Amazon, Pinterest, and Shopify get more growth

It’s a well-known fact that as companies grow larger, everyday decisions become harder to make, which causes companies to move slower. Amazon, Pinterest, and Shopify don’t fall into this trap thanks to their stellar decision-making techniques. Learn from these three companies who went from startups to steadily growing enterprises.

How to Create A Killer Product Team

We sat down with foodora’s Head of Product, Skali as they went through their merger with foodpanda to learn more about their tech team’s use of cross-functional teams and pair designing. The team implemented new measures to challenge their designers to be user-focused and increase team transparency, communication and learning speed. Read about foodora’s use of cross-functional teams and pairing across an entire organization, which are great ways to increase productivity!

Building an A/B Testing Culture From Scratch

Richard Eckles, the growth lead at a video sharing platform, lead us through the task of building an A/B testing culture. Eckles emphasizes the need to continuously test and iterate on previous tests to keep improving your product. This post will encourage your entire organization to work together in failing until you get it right.

How Facebook Improves Customer Experiences with User Feedback

This year, we hosted a great meetup in Toronto where Mike Shaver, the former Director of Engineering at Facebook, gave great insights into using customer experience and reviews to create better feedback. Shaver stressed the importance of generating valuable user feedback and using that feedback to experiment to make a better product. Use Shaver’s expertise to help your product adopt and value a customer-centred approach.

7 Reasons You Shouldn’t A/B Test in House

Many companies are apprehensive to purchase an A/B testing solution because they have already built, or are planning on building an in-house one. Making a capable and complex internal A/B testing software is a huge challenge for many reasons, and in this article, we highlight many of the arguments about building your own. The most important aspect of A/B testing is getting a solution that works for you. This article is helpful for learning what to expect when creating your own A/B testing solution, and what challenges may come your way.

10,000 Experiment Rule

Practice makes perfect applies to experimentation too. In this post, we explore the importance of making many small experiments and iterating on those results, rather than worrying about making larger experiments more impactful. “Deliberate experimentation is more important than deliberate practice in a rapidly changing world.” You’ll learn more about how large organizations rapidly experiment with small changes, and how it helps them succeed in the fast-changing technological world.

Top Posts From Community Thought Leaders

We’ve rounded up of some of our favourite posts from thought leaders who are also pushing brands to create customer-centric experiences.  We’d love to hear about your personal favourites too – let us know in the comments!

The Tenets of A/B Testing from Duolingo’s Master Growth Hacker

In this article, Gina Gotthilf, VP of Growth at language education platform Duolingo reveals all of her A/B testing tips and tricks. Her main takeaway is to always test all aspects of your app, but keep your mission the same throughout your application. She has many detailed tips to optimize experimentation and definitely shows her expertise. Read the article to move your growth onward and upward!

The Mobile Makeup of Instagram’s Beauty Success Stories

The UX chap is one of our favourite bloggers for his tell-it-like-it-is teardown style. This post is a wealth of knowledge and insights that digs deep into some of the modern beauty-fad companies and tears down their mobile experiences. These edgy cosmetic retailers crafted their brands into social experiences, but always have room for improvement in their end-to-end customer journeys. Check out this extremely detailed article by our pal Joe!

Why looking stupid is my superpower

In this post, Farhan Thawar, founder of helpful.com explains why messing up and learning from mistakes is one of the most important ways to grow. Farhan brings up that although failure is romanticized, looking stupid isn’t recognized enough. It’s important to make mistakes and learn from them to better your processes and products.

Forget The 10,000-Hour Rule; Edison, Bezos, & Zuckerberg Follow The 10,000-Experiment Rule

The inspiration for our 10,000 experiment rule piece, Simmons’ article digs deep into his hypotheses about why 10,000 experiments > 10, 000 hours when it comes to bettering yourself, and ultimately your product.

How Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Amazon Learn from Failure

Another dissection of the way that big companies embrace risk-taking in order to learn valuable lessons. As James Quincey of Coca-Cola pus it, “If we’re not making mistakes, we’re not trying hard enough.” Make bold bets in the form of experiments to control the risks you’re taking.

Our Most Popular Go-To Resource

The Ultimate Guide To Mobile A/B testing

This post goes through what A/B testing is, why to use it, and some insights and tips from the companies who are doing it best. Check it out if you’re new to A/B testing or want to freshen up on your skills.

Customer Highlight from the year

Chick-fil-A is seeing conversions increase after changing its in-app payment design

Chick Fil A ran an A/B test using our platform and quickly saw great results. The app’s option to pay with a credit card was unknown to users, which caused much confusion and customer service requests. The digital ran a test that changed the copy on the checkout buttons. With this change, “Not only did we see a lot more people recognize that a credit card option was available, but overall conversions went up!” The mobile product manager added that credit card use on the app increased by 6 per cent after the change was implemented.

What We Accomplished This Year

2017 was a year of growth, change and of course iteration to evolve the way that we help brands craft their digital experiences across every platform for each unique user. 

Taplytics Labs

At Taplytics, we encourage team members to test ideas and hypotheses even if they stretch beyond the scope of our product or defined roles. Taplytics Labs is the sandbox in which these experiments are hosted, designed to inspire a culture of experimentation in our office and share valuable industry insights with the world.

TV app Testing

This November, we were excited to announce that you can now drive personalization and run experiments across all screens with our TV app testing feature, which covers Apple TV, Android TV and Fire TV apps. Our hope is to empower companies to run experiments on TV apps the same way that they do on mobile apps; as frequently and custom as desired without any app store updates needed.

Dashboard Experience 2.0 – redesign and upgrade of functionality and usability

Our dashboard got a revamp this year with added functionality and a sleeker design. Ask for a demo to see how simple it is to use!

Web Testing

As part of our Taplytics Experience Cloud Release, we announced some really exciting news! Taplytics has traditionally only provided capabilities to conduct code based and visual experiments on mobile and TV apps, but launched web experimentation as part of the Experimentation Cloud’s release.  Without requiring a technical skill set, marketers, product managers, designers, and engineers can create personalized and engaging experiences on the web.

Dexter

At the end of the year, we were so happy to introduce you to Dexter, the AI nucleus behind the Taplytics Experience Cloud. Dexter enables brands to make every experience more personal than ever before. Dexter surfaces smart, contextual recommendations on key areas of opportunity within a user’s journey to take the guesswork out experimentation and personalization.

What’s Next?

The Growth of the Taplytics Experience Cloud

We have more releases up our sleeve, and more great products to come in 2018. The Taplytics Experience Cloud is growing to help you create even more magical experiences. 

Cheers to the year of the customer experience revolution!

New year, new you!

Excited about something you read in here? Get in touch, we would love to talk about it! Just say hi to one of our team members in the chat bubble.