On September 25^th and 26th, the Treehouse, represented by John Siwicki, our well-respected Web Production Manager, was invited to Google’s headquarters in California for The Home Services Summit. The purpose of this closed Google event, hosting only approximately 50 handpicked invitees, was to gather like-minded experts from the digital space, specializing in the home services sector. Of course, as experts in contractor website design, we were thrilled to be on that list.

The summit ran for a course of 2 days at Google’s Partner Plex, the official name for their building used exclusively to host special guests for events such as this.  Several external speakers, mostly Professors from the likes of Stanford and Harvard, were also there to address the attendees, together with some senior representatives from Google.  Some interesting topics addressed by these Professors included studies on “The future of work automation”, “New industries from new technologies” and “The Changing Rules of Residential Mobility.” Google brought some serious magic to the table by addressing today’s mobile user behavior in great depth.

“I was expecting a back-to-back presentation of all of Google’s product offerings, I was mistaken. There was a great deal of data and studies shared that were both interesting, and very thought provoking,” says John. He continues to explain that a prominent stat that was shared was the fact that 50% of the population permanently leaves their phones on battery saving mode, which as you may recall, dims the screen somewhat so that the battery can last longer.

“I do the same, I have my own phone on battery saver mode and it never occurred to me that this is something we should be looking into from a mobile site production point of view. Much of the color is lost, the contrast is not nearly as sharp, which leads to a lessor user experience, we absolutely must look at ways to improve the experience, even if the phone is on this mode. This is one of our first action items that we will address at the Treehouse for our dealers.” John vehemently states.

There was a long laundry list of items that John has brought back to the Treehouse from his time at Google for us to investigate, address or test.

Keep tuning back in to the Treemendous blog on these learnings, and for the rest of the result outcomes.