by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
We released Curiosio Beta18 which became a platform for building a Netflix of Trips. Today we are releasing the first carousels of trips on top of it. You could jump right away to the new https://curiosio.com to check it out though we suggest reading further about what we designed, why and how, and what the bigger vision is.
If you are signed in, a click on My Trips will bring you to your travel planning board. The board is a page with a stack of carousels with interactive trip plans. The carousels are dynamic, the plans in the carousels change as you are planning and discovering the world with Curiosio.
Natgeo, Tripadvisor, Lonely Planet & Co
There will be more carousels with interactive trip plans. We are planning to automatically link your favorite and credible web sources of travel info such as National Geographic, Tripadvisor, Lonely Planet, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel+Leisure, Atlas Obscura, and others.
Our crawler will get a “geo soup” from their travel stories and our planner will make interactive trip plans for the soup of points from scratch. Each plan will have a route, itinerary, budget, duration, and breakdown. You will be able to tweak the budget, duration, add/remove points and places until you get your own plan that suits your exclusive needs.
Blogs & Socialtubes
The same approach will be applied to travel blogs and vlogs. Our crawler will automatically get a geo soup from each blog post of your favorite traveler. It will be a piece of work to process videos but it’s possible. Obviously, this will work only for subscribed-paying users-travelers.
You will be able to assign several travel bloggers/vloggers to the same carousel, or you could have a dedicated carousel per supertraveler. If she/he publishes a new travel story then Curiosio will automatically pick it up, make several interactive trip plans from it, and insert them into the carousel so you could see and try them, modify them to your liking and save them for later.
Wish Box
We consider the idea of a Wish Carousel. It could consist of the widgets as Wish Boxes so you could paste web links to the travel stories that you want to convert to interactive. Next time when you open Curiosio and My Trips, you will have the ready-made interactive trips behind those widgets.
Cool & Fun
Crazy and quirky stuff could be the next. It is going to be highly personalized and exclusive, and smart enough to understand flashmobs and trends on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok. Or curation & ideation by sharp trip designers will be needed. E.g. you want to take a road trip where Elon Musk recently drifted in a new Tesla Roadster with his former wife Talulah when they remarried for the third time :-o
All right. Hopefully, we described well enough how Curiosio is going to be a Netflix of Trips. Now, let’s go back to the currently working stuff that you could start using today. It’s focused on your travel planning productivity.
Carousel of Saved Trips
Saved trips are on top because they are the most important for you. We think so. If you made a special action to store the trip plan then it is an indicator that the plan means something to you. Such a plan should be easy to find without looking for it, i.e. it must be in the top carousel at the beginning of it.
You can save the trip by opening it and clicking/tapping the [Save] button on that page. The [Save] button is located above the map on the right. If the screen is narrow — on your phone — then you could hit [More…] to see the functions available for the trip plan. But who is planning travels on the phone? Big screens are better for maps.
There is no function for Unsave or Delete. We will add them if you need them. So far, every newly saved trip plan will automatically appear on the left of the Saved trips carousel. Hence, you are always able to see your recent saves without a single click. You could view all your saved trips by clicking [See all] above the right corner of the carousel.
Carousel of Liked Trips
Similar to Saved trips the carousel of Liked trips is also on top. [Like] is kind of a lazy [Save]. You could [Like] any trip plan independently if you just created it from scratch or opened a signature trip for review.
For the liking — lazy saving — we made an easier accessible button on top on the right. It’s shaped like a heart. You should instantly grasp how to Like. The recently Liked trip will be the leftmost in the Liked carousel.
It’s possible to Unlike. Just click it again. You could Like and Unlike as much as you like:) There is a hack: if you want some trip plans to be at the beginning of the carousel — open them, Unlike, and then Like each of them. They will be the last recently Liked — hence they will be 1, 2, 3 first in the Liked carousel.
Recent Searches Carousel
If you searched in your unique context and opened trip plans from the search results — then those plans will be added to the Recent Searches carousel. The most recently opened trip plan will be on the left.
There is a cognitive effect (we don’t remember the name) when you are getting an idea about the recently viewed thing and want to return to it. In Curiosio — if you reviewed some trip, closed it, and switched to another context — but then suddenly it hit you and you wanna get back to that trip. The carousel of your recent searches will help with this cognitive effect.
Recently Viewed Carousel
Similar to the Recent Searches you may want to return to the recently viewed trip. It could be a recently viewed Signature Trip, or a search result, or your own Saved Trip. We designed a special carousel for such needs — called Recently Viewed.
This carousel must be a good productivity helper for you. It automatically collects the plans of any origin, orders them chronologically, and keeps them for you when you may need them. You could go back in your travel planning history by clicking [See all] above the right corner of the carousel.
Thank you for reading/skimming/scrolling down here. Now it’s a good time to navigate to Curiosio and try new My Trips. You will have to sign in. Curiosio uses Google, Twitter, and a few other authorization providers to give you access to our website. Stay tuned and always follow your curiosity.
If you like Curiosio then please read https://curiosio.com/standwithukraine/ and act to help Ukraine win the war against the terrorist state of the Russian Federation and Belarus. #StandWithUkraine
