brief The charter of the Web Features Experimentation Lab was to identify opportunities to drive revenue and customer satisfaction on the Macy’s web application through an iterative process of ideating, designing, building, testing, and if successful, releasing.
As customers expressed a desire to find fashion products more easily, one of the ideas that came through our ideation process was to provide the ability to show ‘more like this’ for an item.
If a shopper had found something that was close to what they were looking for, clicking ‘More Like This’ would bring them a set of results that were similar.
For our experiment, we chose to define ‘similar’ as ‘visually similar’. A developer from the machine learning team joined us for the project, creating a model that would allow us to submit an image ID to an API which would then return a set of product IDs we deemed as ‘similar’.
result The experiment ran in two different user interface flavors against a percentage of traffic with excellent results, increasing average checkout revenue by a statistically significant amount.
In the case of this experiment, we spun off a dedicated team to complete the build-out of the feature in time for the holiday. The initial feature proved so successful that a larger dedicated team continued work on visual similarity features for the next two years.
In a field of competitive ideas, I was happy to have been the originator of this project.
