Celia’s our Community Design Manager at Dopplr, and many of you may have heard from her when you have a problem or a query about the service.

But, the main part of her job is to take that feedback and use it as a basis for designing new and improved ways for you to use Dopplr.

She’s behind the recent update to one of mainstays of the Dopplr interface - the Traveller Overview.

To mark the redesign, I asked her to write a little about the process of coming up with the new interface.

Over to Celia:

The original impetus behind reworking these pages came from the fact that we’d just launched public profiles. We wondered how much of that thinking we could share with the old page, which had essentially stayed the same since we first launched in 2007.

It started off with the idea that we could make the journal the default tab (rather than Trips) and put some of the modules from the public profile, such as future trips, in a side column of the same page.

One idea that came from that discussion was that we should highlight travel coincidences more, as they’re at the heart of Dopplr. It was suggested that we tag or highlight them in some way, which led to thinking that we could group them and push them to the top of the page. We could group them together as we were already doing on trip pages, so people could easily see who was near them “in time and space”.

The result, as you’ll see, is a page which devotes the top left to to coincidences, the bottom left to the journal (a more comprehensive view of activity on your Dopplr account), and the right hand side to future trips.

We also wanted to make sure that the page worked for new users, or people who hadn’t yet added any trips or fellow travellers. The page they see is focussed on adding trips and making connetions to other people.

To make the navigation work, we created a tab for this page and called it “Overview”. To make it fit, we needed to rework the tab structure a little, while keeping some of the familar features that existing users expected to find.

As part of this work, we also created a new view in the “Your trips” tab that allows you to see your past trips.

Up till now there hadn’t been a good way of doing this: you could navigate via the Journal or use the Carbon tab, but neither were really satisfactory. People would often ask us for a view of their past trips, so it’s something we’re very pleased to have built.

Thanks to Celia for that insight into the process, and of course, all her hard work on the redesign.

We still want to do lots more to make Dopplr clearer, easier and more delightful to use, but I’m really glad that we’re starting to get more ways into browsing past trips. While we’re trying to provide a tool for smarter travel focussed on optimising your future, it’s really pleasurable to look back over where you’ve been and see photos and facts about the trip. Looking forward to doing more on that side of Dopplr.

As ever, we’re looking forward to hearing what you think about the new design.