Ask HN: feedback on my trip and travel planner site | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: feedback on my trip and travel planner site

zipalong.com

37 pointsyoyoyo33 comments

Allow people to use your site before signing up. This is a recording.

Hilarious comment, but seriously: after 4 or 5 clicks, I just didn't feel like clicking on anything else. I didn't see anything interesting until a small little list of a few interesting existing itineraries.

It's trying to be too many things. Do one thing really well. Are you about making lists? Be the best dang list maker there is. Get people bought in as soon as possible. This doesn't mean grab their contacts or get them to put in invited friends. This means get them to create some content they have an attachment to, and fast.

Demonstrate value as early as possible, and keep the user's attention. Every part of the process should be analyzed with a fine tooth comb -- each piece of UI and call to action should have a strong reason to exist. Otherwise, you're just wasting valuable and finite user attention.

Those photos on the home page map get all the attention, buy aren't clickable? (not that I didn't try...)

Yeah I expected it to do something, have the photos interact with the mouse in some way, or some cool effect.

But then I shouldn't be looking at a nice map made up of pictures, wondering what the website is all about. I think a tagline/elevator pitch is needed somewhere obvious.

http://www.rolyn.co.uk/wub.htm

You've got a really great tour, maybe consider using the homepage map as a link to it.

It is a neat piece of art tho. It would be cool if it was regularly re-generated from Flickr geotags...

You definitely need a tagline on what the site is doing straight below the TOP LEFT corner. No many people will click into the "what is zipalong" link.

If I didn't get to the site from YC news, I will think that it is just another photo site rather than a travel site.

It's clever that you put the logo at the top right corner. But, it may hurt the usability because users tend to think that logo should be at the top left corner of the site. It is good to innovate but sometimes it is even better to follow the norm since most of the sites put the logo at the top left corner.

Anyway, I have no time to review the site now. I have to leave my office now. Will let you know once I get back to my home.

I like the design (though perhaps a bit gradient-heavy, I prefer flat) but you should definitely add some sort of tagline, or at least put the "what is zipalong" link in a different color or something; I didn't even see it the first time I opened the site. Just seeing a login form, I immediately closed the tab. Good thing I read the comments, because this looks really cool.

One small usability tip: you could pretty easily combine the login and registration forms. Just put an extra "register" button, do a username check, then add a second password box and the name fields. Also, it'd be a little nicer (though I see what you're doing with the in-one-line thing) if you stacked the password confirmation box under the other; I usually visually compare the lengths before hitting "enter".

Also, I noticed that the look and feel is in many ways similar to Flickr, especially the colors. I don't know if that's a positive or a negative; on the one hand, it will immediately associate your site with photography for anyone who's used Flickr before, while on the other hand it may make it harder to establish a unique brand.

I haven't explored the inside of the site much, but from what I can tell, you've done a pretty good job. Keep up the good work, and good luck.

Thank you for the feedback! We'll be revamping the FrontPage in the next few days, and we'll take these ideas into account.

I feel like the site isn't really selling its benefits to me. I do organize some trips, but I wouldn't use this now because I don't want to bother everyone by telling them to sign up to this service, when I don't really know what the benefit would be.

Travel is such an interesting area, mostly because it is seeing so little new innovation that I feel there must be something big lurking just around the corner. There are few well known types of sites, such as review / listing aggregator sites, flight price comparison engines, these organize-your-own-trip sites (that seem to be quite niche) but it is so rare to see any new ideas. The only really new thing I've found is SeatGuru, which lets you find the best seats, which really provides useful information for the travel planning process. Those Facebook applications where you can show your travels on a map in your profile were a nice idea too.

Anything I'm missing?

Thanks, we're trying to improve the selling pitch :)

What makes us different from other travel sites is that we try to take a semantically meaningful view of a trip so that you can organize anything and everything about your trips in one place.

And we hope to do it so that you can come back in 10,20,30 years and retrace your steps and have fun with your past trips.

First, great work! You have a nice site, at least that is my impression from the tour. The sales pitch of keeping everything in one place and sharing it with friends who may be meeting us along the way is great.

My wife and I are planning a trip around the world. It's been pretty complicated so far. Just getting that amount of air travel figured out has been difficult (mainly because the Star Alliance RTW tool appears to have a recursion depth of 1...). We're just now working on booking places to stay, tours to take, shoehorning various experiences and adventures into the spaces between flights.

Convince me to use your site. What significant advantage will it have over a spreadsheet full of travel plans? Over a blog with pictures and a google maps widget? What does "semantically meaningful" mean to me as a traveler? Do you mix in current data (travel warnings, visa requirements, etc.) with my plans so they are relevant at later dates?

Thank you!

We have done a lot of traveling ourselves, and the original inspiration for the site was to package all the various spreadsheets, notes, and disjoint sites that we've used during the planning.

Are we at the point where we can replace all of that? Not yet. But we are getting there, and using the site gives you automatic access to all the tools that are coming online the next little while.

You have a _nice_ place (no nasty ads) to store all the information related to your trip, in a way that you'll enjoy in the future (in fact, you will have access to some really cool stuff that we have planned almost for free as you'll have all the relevant information in one place). So the more we develop the site, the more you'll get out of your data without you having to do anything additionally.

Now, you seem like a sophisticated user, and probably you'll still need your spreadsheets. But we can certainly use feedback from users like you in terms of features that would help you ditch those spreadsheets.

So indeed, short term plans are to mix in the current data with your plans. Give you customized documentation based on your itinerary. Make it easier for you to search the best travel rates (or even doing it automagically for you).

We'll get there shortly.

I'll give you a hint, I am not the sophisticated one ;)

I'm looking forward to giving your site a whirl!

I took the tour and from what I saw it seems like an amazing service with loads of features. I also love the design (from what I saw in the thumbnails). Agreed that you should switch the logo and courtesy nav... logo on top left, nav on top right.

This is a no brainer: Make the whole continental thing, as well as the logo (only on the front page) link to the tour. I got to the site and didn't know what to do. As a travel site, guess what's the last thing you want your users to feel when using your site? Lost.

As per the tour (I have no need to sign up for this service right now), it looks incredible. All the thumbnails look beautiful and the site looks loaded with really awesome features. Unfortunately, the stupid slideshow kept moving forward even when I explicitly clicked on a number. Not a big deal because only a small percentage of people will care enough to view a picture in the slideshow anyway, but it wouldn't hurt to fix.

If you really want to impress users, there's no substitute for a live demo. Lead users to the tour, and on each page of the tour, link them to the demo account: "see it live in a demo" If you're worried about crap in the demo, just have the demo reset itself every hour.

If it were up to me, I'd keep the continental thing, but only as a background. I'd put a nice faded box on top of it with the following:

1 sentence telling me what you do: "[logo]zipalong[/logo] lets you organize and share your trips" and two buttons: "live demo" and "tour of features".

Seems like a cool site so far :-)

The itinerary "Summary" on this sample trip <http://zipalong.com/zip/Trip.page?tripId=42626548>; was quite long. The map neatly fits the browser window, but I have to scroll down past it to see all of the summary. Also, the content of the summary seems quite verbose. Many of the entries in this list could be represented more compactly while still managing to improve comprehension.

I think that this itinierary view has more than a few things in common with Google Maps' public transportation directions. Plan a bus trip around your favorite supported US city and see if that inspires you to improve this view.

Thanks for your time. We like it too :-)

You're right about the long Summary list. Improving this one is actually on our ToDo right now. Great suggestion, thanks!

Loaded the page saw a pretty cool photo continent collage, but was unable to interact with such and there was no text to tell me briefly what zipalong does.

As stated above, it's best to allow use of your site without requiring sign up or have facebook/open social sign in if it requires sign up.

good luck!

I second that - really great collage begging to be clicked on - make us able to interact with it somehow. One suggestion would be a bit of information about each destination on mouse over.

I have no idea what this does better than TripIt/TripAdvisor/<insert travel site here> or why I would want to use it.

Wow, looks slick and nice Just curious, how many people have been working on this?

One small thing is that you should maybe allow people to view a sample trip from your main page (maybe also a link to something like http://zipalong.com/zip/TripAnimation.page?tripId=42887183) When I arrived on the main page, I tried clicking on the map and it didn't work and I would have closed the page if I wasn't coming from here to give feedback. I almost didn't click on the What is Zipalong? link. Your tour is slick, well made and made me want to sign up though but I usually prefer seeing a real use case rather than a tour usually.

Looks cool. I signed up. Going to have an API?

I like the icons/graphics.

Yes, we are considering providing an API.

We just added "trip embeddability" which allows you to create a trip on Zipalong, and then embed it (a-la Youtube) inside other web pages, such as you blog.

Of course, that's not really an API, but it's a start. We'd be interested in use cases for the API, it would helps us build a more useful API.

I signed up:

+ve: very slick and liked the design a lot.

-ve: whilst the UI was slick I found it a bit clunky. It took too many clicks to achieve things, particularly adding an Itinerary - I think being able to blast a bunch of cities into a text box would be the way I'd like to start.

Great idea - one of the best suggestions we got for that area of the site. We'll look into implementing it in the next little while. P.S. Glad you like the looks :)

As others have mentioned, you desperately need to explain what you do on the front page. Once I understood what your site is, my first thought was "Facebook for traveling."

Now the hard part. What do you provide that people can't already do on Facebook? This is what you need to stress.

Show, don't tell. Show me a diary that somebody wrote recently so that I can imagine myself using this.

I do like the integrated-ness of the diaries + photos functionality. Deep Facebook integration would be great (either add to my Facebook photos + notes or at least post as shared items to my profile).

What do your competitors look like?

I'm thinking of using this for a trip I'm taking in the summer (http://str8.to/around-the-world-at-twice-the-speed-of-fogg)

I know the guys who made this, they've been working hard on it for over a year. I'm curious what news.yc thinks.

I'm getting this after a long wait:

  The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
  The proxy server could not handle the request GET /proxy/FrontPage.page.

  Reason: Error reading from remote server

Looks really cool. I don't travel much, but next time I do I'll give it a try.

Very nice UI. Unfortunately very commonplace idea.

Wow, this looks great. Just signed up.

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