Not so great:
- Wish I can import travel data. Having the user enter data for places they’ve been and trips they’re taking without any incentives is a high threshold for engagement.
- Consistency. Example - I can add places to my passport but not easily take them away or edit them. Seems like an oversight and probably a need to get back to the UX wireframes.
- Who to follow. I signed in via twitter, but anything ‘social’ should have an easy 1-step method to import contacts from Facebook, Gmail, and my other online communities. In fact, this should be the number one priority for any social community.
- The primacy of recent questions seems odd to me. Especially when it’s populated by people I don’t know, initially. Are travelers that incentivized to answer questions for other people? We’ve seen this with Dopplr and countless other community sites. Lonely Planet’s Thorntree works because the context is there – I’ve just been back from a trip or am going someplace… I’m in a thread or a forum that’s dedicated to that topic, so I’m more likely to converse with like-minded people. Having an open ended stream seems overwhelming to me as a user in the travel space.. there’s just too much here for me to process.
- Why should I write a review? What’s the social hook here, other than I’m contributing to a network and it strokes my ego to be in the know? Seems antiquated given the rise of games like Foursquare and Gowalla.
- When nothing’s happening.. I’m assuming this is being worked on but: where’s the personality? This feels like a tool to me, an application versus a community. Empty states (like profiles when there are no trips planned) feels like an empty apartment before the tenants moved in. What you want instead is a demo apartment, with nice looking (if fake) furniture – just something to get users excited about the potential of their profiles and experience with the product.
Pretty good:
- Search for places is fast and accurate.
- Design is ok enough. Tasks are clear - but I’m not sure I agree on the priorities.. and certain things like the sign up flow is a bit clunky. Bright pink notes whenever a field isn’t filled in? Kind of jarring.
- Writing a review is simple (thank god for not having categories and other necessary inputs)
Ok, after 30 minutes of going through the product, my initial take is:
- It’s an ambitious product but I’m not sure how it’s a different take on any other social travel site out there (IgoUgo, Matador, Nile Guides, etc.)
- It’s a social site but there are little incentives (other than the user’s own analness and predilection to record their travels) for people to join in and engage
- The design is meh; it’s good enough but that’s not going to cut it in this space. I may be wrong on this one (see Tripadvisor) but I think that’s what the guys at Gogobot are trying to do. It feels very big corporate Silicon Valley to me.. and that’s not what should be happening. I should see some personality in an early stage service like this.
- I do respect the effort, however. Travel is a notoriously fragmented and competitive space for a user-centric and content driven service to succeed. Wish them all the luck.