Why testing an idea before implementation is not enough?

The world we live in constantly moves towards simplification. Helping us humans save time is one of the main goals of any business out there. After all, time is money.

We develop solutions for issues we face and continue to evolve them to further advance our services/products.

A big part of the process of developing solutions is that testing an idea. It's not as simple as it sounds (IE: click a few buttons and be done with it?).

Testing requires a systematic approach. Building a prototype, coming up with an MVP, collecting data, setting up goals, seeking critics and monitoring... It's a complex process to actually properly test ideas and make them ready for the market.

You will be surprised to hear even the largest firms get this wrong. In fact, more often than you might think.

In this example, I encountered an issue with Booking.com on 16 Apr 2022.

I live in the UK and I recently purchased return flights via Booking.com to Turkey.

When I travelled to Turkey, before the return flight date I went on to booking.com to take a look at my booking information. It did not go well...

No probs... I was not going to book any flights so this shouldn't affect me.

I clicked my bookings to view my return flight info. Boom...

I am not booking flights... Show me my booking details please! Frustration, ignorance, misery...

So what this means is that they came up with an idea to Geo IP block anyone in Turkey from using their flights page. Even though I am not trying to book a flight their product simply applies a top level IP block on their flights directory and I can't view my booking as a result.

You see how poorly their product was tested? If tested at all..

Now, I can obviously use a VPN to bypass this. I also tried to do the same on Mobile app and it worked.

This is another problem on top. Desktop applies a geo IP block but you can bypass it via mobile.

Now, as a person who lives in the UK and purchased his return flights from UK to Turkey, I am unable to reach my flight information as a result of poor implementation booking.com did.

Collecting feedback

If you are not great at testing, next option to make sure you don't continue to provide a miserable service to your users is by actively collecting feedback and listening to pain points. As soon as you launch a service/product or in particular implement such restrictions like this, immediately start collecting data/feedback.

Build data points. Inform CS teams. Listen to the social media. Bring all data to your product team who worked on the product. Let them test again and replicate the issues reported. Prioritise the fix and apply.

I believe they have processes set up to do just that but I doubt they care enough to come up with a quick fix. This could be one of the things that they believe it doesn't affect a considerate number of users and as everything has a monetary value, KPIs are killing the great user experience we strive to provide.

Issues like these are super common and I believe something big is coming down the line to help us escape from such misery. I am quite good with tech, knowing how these issues can affect the health of many vulnerable customers or elderly people, I can only hope that large firms can still show some empathy and make sure they take the necessary steps next time a bit better than before.