Hello!

My name’s Celia, and I’ve joined Dopplr as the Community Design Manager. As Matt said, that means that my job is to talk to the people out there who are using Dopplr, find out what’s working and what’s not, and help the development team improve things accordingly.

This is going to take a few different forms. For example, sometimes I might post screenshots or prototypes that we’ve been working on, and ask for your feedback. Other times I might ask you seemingly vague questions to try and get to the bottom of what you’d really like us to do for you. Or I might ask you quite directed questions about something that we’ve already built - and that’s what I’m about to do now.

We think the ‘Manage Connections’ page could be better. We have some ideas up our sleeves, but we’d like to know what you think of it, too. What’s working for you, and what’s not? Let us know what you think by joining the discussion over on the Satisfaction site.

Look forward to talking to you there!

As MattB notes in a comment in another posting, we just upgraded the way we handle time zones. Your location is calculated just after midnight in your current location rather than midnight GMT, as was previously the case.

What does this mean? Basically this: Travellers in California will no longer have their departures announced 8 hours early.

As a North American I’ve been slightly vexed by one of our settings that reflects Dopplr’s European heritage. This is the popup calendar when creating or editing a trip that showed a Monday to Sunday week. I’m used to seeing the calendar as Sunday through Saturday.

MattB and team have come up with a nifty interim fix. They’ve installed a calendar that uses your home location to decide. North Americans get Sunday to Saturday weeks, and the rest of the world gets Monday to Sunday. So my edit-trip calendar looks like this:

Again, this is just an interim step. You’ll soon be able to make this decision for yourself in the “Your account” settings.

Since we launched our updated place database last week we’ve been working on a number of improvements which have just gone live.

A couple of people pointed out that we still don’t list some important cities (including Hobart, the capital of Tasmania). On advice from Marc of Geonames, we’ve been able to add all capitals cities that they know about in their database. We’ve also made capitals the default selection whenever there’s a name clash. For example, if you type Hobart then we’ll assume you mean Australia and not Hobart, Indiana. I should add that if you’ve listed a trip to Hobart, Indiana before then we’ll remember that next time and use it next time in preference.

Secondly, we’ve had a few long-standing naming confusions in our database. Geonames uses local naming whenever possible. Outside Ireland it’s not well-known that Dublin is really called Baile Átha Cliath. To avoid confusion, we’ve tidied up several such names. This should make adding trips to Moscow, Prague, Rotterdam and Frankfurt a little simpler. We haven’t forgotten the original naming - we still do the right thing if you search for Москва - but the defaults are now English names.

Satisfaction, which calls itself “People Powered Customer Service,” offers conversations about products and services. We’ve joined the Dopplr conversation at the site, and will keep track of issues you bring to our attention there.

Let us know if this is helpful.

We’ve put live a few UI tweaks today.

No revolutions: all evolutions to make the information simpler and easier to comprehend, we hope. There are more in the pipeline and, as always, let us know what you think via the usual feedback mechanism.

A fresh pair of eyes and squadron of fingers was brought to bear on the UI in the form of Boris Anthony.

Boris is well known for his work on Global Voices. I met him a few years back, while at a workshop in Tokyo, and have long admired his interaction design and coding skills. I was delighted when we managed to convince him to collaborate with us on Dopplr.

One day early on in doing this ‘tweaking round’ - while we were working through some layouts I’d done in Photoshop and flows I’d done in Omnigraffle - Boris remarked in IM: “let’s stop talking and painting, and start sculpting…”

By which he meant, build to think (as our friends in IDEO say) and you’ll get to a good place, quicker.

This has been the revelation for me, of working with MattB and, latterly, Boris. That - with the right crew - sketching in software can be as fast, effective and design-oriented as prototyping in pixels or paper.

We’re doing all of the above of course, as fast as we can, to hear back from you what works and what not-so-much… So let us know!

At Dopplr we’re big fans of giving you your information anywhere you want it. Our philosophy is that you shouldn’t have to visit dopplr.com to get the benefits of membership. In the future this is going to mean a mobile-friendly stripped-down XHTML site, more interaction over SMS and integration with platforms like Twitter. For now, it mostly means feeds.

So far, most of the personal Atom and calendar feeds on Dopplr have used HTTP Basic Authentication to protect access. It turns out that even in 2007 there are some important newsreader applications that don’t support this scheme, and this has been causing problems for people.

Today we changed the feed URLs to use ‘obscure’ tokens as a privacy scheme. This means you’ll no longer need to enter a password to access a feed because each URL is personalised to you with an unguessable token like 53adfbc52bffabefd44cdf0a7383247040dbd99eb65a07365952059dc3849c95. Of course, because the URL is all you need to read your information, you should take care not to reveal it in public or share it with anyone you don’t trust.

We haven’t disabled the original scheme; if you’ve already subscribed to a feed and it’s working for you then it should continue to work. However, any new feed URL that you get from the site will work in the new way.

The one exception to this is personal iCal feeds. If you’re reading your itinerary through a calendar application then it’ll have a URL like http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/mattb/ical. This will no longer work and you’ll need to visit your account page and get a new URL. I’m sorry about that.

As always, if you have problems then don’t hesitate to get in touch by sending feedback through the site.

‘Feature Creep’ is a constant temptation when building a system. We’re trying very hard not to add new features - instead, we’re trying to make things easier, more powerful, and more flexible for our fellow travellers.

We prefer to talk about adding ‘affordances‘ - additions and improvements to the tool-like aspects of the service that amplify the benefits of using of the service and our end-goals: increasing serendipity in the world around your travels.

Currently, amongst other things, we’re working on improving the way you can nominate and describe your travels, and manage the people who can and can’t see that information easily and, most importantly, with a politeness that befits…

We’re going to be using this blog to announce new ‘affordances’ and get your feedback on them.

Watch this space!