by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
The first facelift for Curiosio Beta15 is ready. It includes a new Landing Page, a new Search Form, and a new visual of the search-in-progress. We designed the Landing Page because the old one was not understood by the first-time visitors. We redesigned the Search Form because even recurring users experienced hiccups with interaction. We animated the search progress to ease the 40s waiting. You could jump to Curiosio right away to check the new look & feel.
The initiative is originating from product design analysis and planning. It is going to be at least one more facelift focused on fine-tuning interaction. And after that, most probably we will do Beta16, which will allow searching by both point and place names, maybe even by alternative names for the same place.
Landing Page
The new Landing Page must better communicate the purpose, the concept, brand, style, etc. Newcomers shall understand where they have landed. Curious travelers must start resonating with everything they see and feel. They must feel curiosity and follow their curiosity.
There are limitations though. You must select one of the two dozens of available countries to continue. We are not planning to add new countries in the nearest future; though we’d like to add Spain, Portugal… and a bunch from Africa: Nigeria, Kenya, Namibia, Tanzania, Botswana, Morocco. Stay tuned, the plans could change.
In the current version, it’s possible to select only by country name. Perhaps it will be Beta16 where we will unlock search for anything directly from the Landing Page. Curiosio will automatically recognize where your point or place or even region is and navigate you to the corresponding Country Page with some trip plans to get started. Also, pre-fill the search form so that could you add other params and kick off the creation of your unique trip plans.
Country Page
After you select a country on the Landing Page you are navigated to that Country Page. On the Country Page, you can create interesting road trips in that country.
We made two changes to the search form. The first change is the relocation of the More/Less button, making them noticeable, more convenient to click. By default, you are seeing the simple search form. By expanding it with “More⌄” you are getting the advanced search form. Many parameters are available only in the advanced search mode.
The second change is the relocation of the travel-through input field to the advanced mode. The functionality of the travel-through field has remained the same — you can enter the names of cities, towns, parks, some villages, some places that are on their own.
And finally, animated search in progress. It should be easier to wait for your unique trip plans now…
Of course, it’s better to make the search faster. We will start making it faster after we unlock entering any names — points and POIs, everything. Also, by deploying onto 2x faster chips we can cut the time 2x instantly. Meanwhile, it will be an animation of the progress…
Other
Trip Markup Language has been turned off. From this version, you can not prepare the requirements in the semi-plain text and bulk paste them into Curiosio. Maybe we will enable it again via additional interface/interaction…
Why did we switch it off? Because users required pasting point by point as they find them on Instagram or YouTube or Facebook or elsewhere. They are pasting one point at a time. It’s impossible to support two ways of pasting, hence we sacrificed the advanced one.
This version of Curiosio was tested in Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, mobile DuckDuckGo web browsers. There is still that nasty networking issue in Firefox if the search request takes 100s. We advise you to use Chrome, Chromium. There is a big probability that everything works right in Safari. Stay tuned and always follow your curiosity!
