by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
Hey fellow travelers who want to travel the world, who understands that there is only one planet [until it’s only two], one life, and only two scarce resources to spend — time and money. Today, two months after the release of Beta11, we are releasing smarter and nicer Beta12 for you. You will get a better experience for your time and money in any geography. You could jump to the new version right away at https://curiosio.com.
It is better to continue reading, to grasp our thinking process, and see what we wanted to tell you with this release. We will show you what is new and will describe our motivation why we implemented [or not implemented] the things.
Mission
The mission of the Beta12 was to make Curiosio 10x more practical.
Two things defined the scope: visible and easy to implement Landing Page, and hardly visible and difficult to implement Perimeter. Different travelers want easy access to their home countries, for domestic travel by car. Almost all travelers want custom perimeter, telling Curiosio their area of interest to get interesting trip plans focused on See & Do within that area.
Landing Page
Before, you were landing on the page of some country. It was the United States for a while, but not always. Now, you will be landing on the World page, and select your country of interest there. You can click on a signature trip and then stay in the country of that trip. You can click explicitly on the country of your interest in the directory below the carousel of signature trips.
The mobile layout keeps the countries in vertical accordion. You see the stack of continents or their combinations. Hitting the continent will dynamically open and show the available countries. Hitting the country name opens the page with the search box you are familiar with.
World Home
A new menu item “World” will bring you back to the World page where you could start over. “World” is analogous to “Home” that you are most probably be familiar with for years. Hit “World” when you want to reset to defaults.
Perimeter
Let’s start off with implicit-default perimeter. I’m a San Franciscan. I’m planning to take a road trip to Mammoth Lakes. I want to visit Calistoga and Columbia on the way. I’m curious what other points to visit but I don’t know them. I want See & Do at each point. I need a flexible itinerary. The journey must be 4 days, $1000 for 2 travelers, my car. Given these requirements, what is the best trip plan?
Now, let’s set custom perimeter below Mammoth Lakes — over Sequoia National Park, Death Valley National Park, Red Rock Canyon State Park, etc.
In the example below your three waypoints remain — Calistoga to the north from San Francisco, Columbia and Mammoth Lakes to the east and a bit to the south. The number of days remains tight 4d, the budget is $1K for two, and you are going in your own car from San Francisco and returning back. But now you are setting your own perimeter!
When a perimeter is set then Curiosio is trying to include your waypoints wherever they are, and searching for the rest cool points within the perimeter. It is analogous to many perimeters simultaneously — one big and multiple small (e.g. Calistoga above San Francisco is a tiny perimeter). This is very powerful.
The semi-transparent blue rectangle is from our Lab version. The public version doesn’t show this blue square. We are showing the real testing-debugging screenshots for the sake of demonstrating to you how it is working. How you are telling Curiosio your area of interest, your points of interest, and how Curiosio is doing what you want and giving you more on top of that.
Here is the same custom perimeter, for the same search query without any waypoints. You as a traveler who lives in San Francisco (or Bay Area) defined the perimeter of your interest, 4d trip duration, $1K budget for 2, driving your own car. No travel-through points anymore. Proposed trip plans are vastly inside the perimeter — by geographical points and the time spent.
Some points are proposed outside of the perimeter between your starting and finishing point. This is for your safety, to make a stop, to take a rest, to stretch your legs, to eat, to refuel/recharge.
You could set your own perimeter by hitting the square button in the left-top corner of the search box. A new perimeter form will be opened. Just zoom and move the map as you need and hit [Save] button. You can always see whether your custom perimeter is active by the icon — the slim line means nothing custom, the fat line means custom in action.
Several words about the interaction design. We wanted to implement perimeter selection with a finger on touch screens and a mouse on other screens. This would delay the Beta12 release. Then we wanted to implement some cool map effects to tease you to move and zoom the map to define the perimeter. That was also postponed because the map control lives its own life and requires too much effort to be tamed. We keep in consideration perimeter from the name — for example — Napa Valley, Great Lakes, Saxon Switzerland, Cappadocia. The name could be written and spoken. All this will be analyzed and triaged again in the future. While today, who wanted perimeter — here you go — figure out how to hack it and apply it for making your better journeys.
Now, it is definitely the time to navigate to curiosio.com and check it out! We tested Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, DuckDuckGo. If you have Safari — do us a favor please — check and report if something isn’t perfect. Thanks ahead \m/
A dozen of countries were implemented on top of Beta11. From now we will continue adding new interesting countries on top of Beta12. The URL to the smartest version will always be clean cool curiosio.com. Stay tuned and always follow your curiosity.
