by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
Today we are releasing the new version of Curiosio. It is working from our primary web address at https://curiosio.com. This version is more diverse and faster than beta10 that we released in early November. A few surprises present here, so get tuned to a curious story.
Variety & Diversity
We noticed that user expectations from the search are different. If it is a new search then variety is expected. Specifically — a geometric variety of the proposed routes is appreciated. This is inspiration — how many interesting alternatives are out there. This is education — what is possible in your requirements and desires. This is variety. Macro-scale. We did it.
We noticed that when you are sticking to the specific trip plans, you want diversity by points and places. What was not so important during the inspiration is becoming very important during analysis and comparison. You are investigating point by point, place by place, get educated on the way how interesting the world is. This is diversity. Micro-scale. We almost did it.
Themes will improve both variety and diversity. Follow us to not miss this announcement, we will do the themes in the next versions of Curiosio.
2x Faster
The current version is almost 2x faster than the previous one. The response time is adaptive. If Curiosio is confident it is responding sooner. Sometimes the search results are returned in 25-30s, sometimes in 40s. It’s possible to provide mutually badly exclusive requirements that Ingeenee (AI engine powering Curiosio) will keep trying for a minute or so and won’t find a good solution… Be smart, be creative, be geeky, use Curiosio to boost your own creativity. You continue following your curiosity and the AI is helping you.
US CA AU NZ DE
The promised surprises are starting here. We kept the United States and Canada, as it was in the previous version, and replaced Italy and France with Australia, New Zealand, and Germany.
AUSTRALIA and NEW ZEALAND
It’s Summertime. In Australia aka AU and New Zealand aka NZ it is summer now, despite it is called winter. The world is not flat. During December and January, it’s like in June and July in the United States.
We have heard that the Aussies defeated the COVID and are back to normal life. Let’s hope there will be no new outbreaks. As the borders remain closed — here you go — use Curiosio for domestic roadtripping in Australia.
New Zealand is being released for the first time. New Zealand is going with two curious signature trips. One is inspired by Atlas Obscura. Another is inspired by Orbitz, focused on the Lord of the Rings places. New Zealand is beautiful! Use Curiosio for an interesting car trip in New Zealand.
GERMANY
Germany aka DE is being released for the first time. Germany is going with two curious signature trips. One is for geeks — it’s Bauhaus. Another is a breakout from Berlin to Saxon Switzerland. Germany is so rich for curious travelers. Ask Curiosio to make an interesting car trip in Germany.
A/B Testing of Ingeenee
Why such list of countries in Beta11? Curiosio is an artificial smartness. You as a traveler is the pinnacle of creativity that only you understand. Curiosio is your legal and healthy steroids. Curiosio is running on top of the AI engine Ingeenee. We noticed that our AI thing likes diversity and scale — it is getting smarter from being exposed to more of the world. So we configured slightly different Ingeenee instances behind those five countries, to run some A/B testing.
We want to see which trip plans people like more. What works better for inspiration? What works better for education? What works better for fine-tuning? Where session time is longer, where stickiness is stronger, etc.
Hacks vs. Usability
Home & Own Car
There is some implicit functionality that not everybody grasps. If you are driving from home and returning back, by your own car, then Curiosio is not proposing you any points in the vicinity [by default]. You can always explicitly specify the points that you want and Curiosio will understand you.
E.g if you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area, want a short road trip, you know a few points you want to visit —Mammoth Lakes, Calistoga, Columbia — and curious what else is out there — type the points into the search box, SF as the first and SF as the last, select Own Car, days, $, and hit [GET TRIP].
Clicking vs. Dragging
The carousel with trip plans is draggable. Users have no problems with this on mobiles because it’s natural to swipe there. But desktop users are clicking those red arrowheads vs. dragging. This was a mystery for us. Almost nobody, except the programmer who coded it, is dragging on the desktop.
After we told one desktop user that dragging works she switched from clicking to dragging instantly. Do you want to click or drag? Shall we make those arrowheads bigger (click area) or leave them as is because you can drag/swipe the carousel sideways?
Misc
From now we are discontinuing beta10. It will not work from its beta10.curiosio.com web address anymore. Thank you for using it before! Big probability your interaction did impact the design of beta11, really \m/
Where are France and Italy? They will be back pretty soon. We are going to experiment with them. There are ideas how to reach the higher quality of “lazy” search — when you are not typing any points.
All right, curious reader, if you have been reading-scrolling down to here, it’s good to navigate to curiosio.com and try the new version of Curiosio.
