Mapplet Goals

The primary purpose of the mapplet is to provide a map-based interface that allows users to easily and quickly find hotels in specific areas of a destination city; refine their choices by price band, amenities, and so forth; and use an interface to a hotel “booking engine” that can display brochure pages about specific hotels. As you’d probably hope for this type of application, the mapplet also provides a booking capability so that users can make hotel reservations online.

The first release of the mapplet will work for all cities within the United States. Future releases may support major international cities as well. The existence of the mapplet is expected to allow scaling of traffic through the website by a couple of orders of magnitude from its current state, so performance requirements related to scalability of the number of concurrent users are very important. For that reason (among others) we’re not Doing The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work (DTSTTCPW), nor are we “turning a blind eye toward future requirements.” Rather, we’re making a concerted effort to think ahead, make smart design decisions, and put an architecture in place early that won’t result in severe performance degradation as the number of users increases.

Another major goal of the mapplet is to make it easy to construct web pages for destinations with local, street-level hotel maps featured on them.

The mapplet’s goals can be summed up in the following list:

1. Allow scalability of traffic by allowing map-centric destination pages (and associated pay-per-click advertising) to be produced rapidly for any city in the United States (related feature: pass in a hotel ID as a parameter to the mapplet on startup).

2. Build a repeat clientele (related feature: save user preferences in a cookie).

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   Increase the “wow” factor of the website (related feature: very fast display filtering by price band).

3. Make the site more useful to business travelers (related features: search by chain and driving directions).

4. Make the site more useful to vacationers (related features: search by amenity, search by price band, etc.).

It’s useful to define a small set of high-level goals at the start of a project. Then if one of these goals changes midproject, we get a good idea of how much of the requirements and design need to change to accommodate the shift in direction. Essentially, this means that we can manage change rather than embrace it.