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.

As we head out of the summer (or whatever passed for it here in London) we thought it was time to take another of our semi-regular looks at where we’re headed for the rest of the year.

This time around, instead of just plotting the popular destinations, which don’t change significantly from season-to-season – we’d try and surface the outliers.

That is, the extraordinary places that have attracted significant numbers of people from the beginning of September til the end of November.

To do this, we used a property of our database we call excitement, which the other Matt – MattB – can tell you all about, in his by-now-traditional “here comes the science bit”:

When we set out to summarise the travel outlook for the end of 2008, we wanted to do more than just list destinations by simple popularity. As frequent travellers we’re interested in what’s off the beaten path: the anomalies in travel patterns as well as the hubs.

To do this, we created a metric that compares activity in a location over a time period to the average activity there. For each active trip destination, we look at its six-month history to see how many trips have gone there and how many travellers live there.

We then divide one by the other. This means that centres of travel like London, Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo get a relatively low score, and places that are suddenly popular will spring to the top of the list.

And the top-ten destinations in terms of excitement this Autumn, are as follows:

• Black Rock City, NV, United States
• Mandelieu, France
• Linz, Austria
• Tianjin, China
• Riva del Garda, Italy
• Isle of Wight, United Kingdom
• Brighton, United Kingdom
• Ródos, Greece
• Camden, ME, United States
• Osaka, Japan

While we can only speculate on why some of these cities are so popular this autumn, we’re pretty certain why Black Rock City’s at the top of the list.

This is of course because it is a city that only exists for a certain time, once a year for Burning Man. A temporary community that constructs itself, that gets mapped by that community, and now tops our social atlas of the Fall. Perfect!

Thanks to everyone who filled in our traveller survey recently. We were bowled-over by the responses, and fascinated by some of the trends we uncovered, for instance: when travellers tell Dopplr about their travel plans, two-thirds of them have not yet booked a hotel and half have not yet made any travel arrangements.

This is encouraging, as it shows that you’re really using Dopplr to optimise the future, and travel smarter – which is why we built it!

We got a lot of constructive criticism and suggestions also, of things that bug you, or things you’d like to see Dopplr provide – and we’re going to be writing a series of responses here on the blog over the autumn.

Many, many thanks to you all – one of the best things about helping build Dopplr is receiving feedback from passionate users. Remember we’ve got our Get Satisfaction Dopplr forum for you to contribute to also.

But, back to the autumn outlook.

As I said – the top destinations don’t change that much from season to season, as you might expect with the majority of our travel being for business; but we thought it might be revealing to segment the top destinations by continent.

Top ten destination cities for travellers from Europe
1. London, United Kingdom
2. Berlin, Germany
3. New York, NY, United States
4. Paris, France
5. Amsterdam, Netherlands
6. San Francisco, CA, United States
7. Munich, Germany
8. Brighton, United Kingdom
9. Barcelona, Spain
10. Stockholm, Sweden

Top ten destination cities for travellers from Asia
1. London, United Kingdom
2. Singapore, Singapore
3. Tokyo, Japan
4. Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China
5. Beijing, China
6. New York, NY, United States
7. San Francisco, CA, United States
8. Paris, France
9. Bangkok, Thailand
10. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Top ten destination cities for travellers from North America
1. New York, NY, United States
2. San Francisco, CA, United States
3. London, United Kingdom
4. Chicago, IL, United States
5. Las Vegas, NV, United States
6. Los Angeles, CA, United States
7. Washington, DC, United States
8. Boston, MA, United States
9. Paris, France
10. Atlanta, GA, United States

Top ten destination cities for travellers from Africa:
1. London, United Kingdom
2. New York, NY, United States:
3. Amsterdam, Netherlands
4. Geneva, Switzerland
5. Dubai, United Arab Emirates
6. Lisbon, Portugal
7. Paris, France
8. Cape Town, South Africa
9. Boston, MA, United States
10. Nairobi, Kenya

Top ten destination cities for travellers from South America
1. Buenos Aires, Argentina
2. Sao Paulo, Brazil
3. New York, NY, United States
4. Santiago, Chile
5. London, United Kingdom
6. Paris, France
7. San Francisco, CA, United States
8. Madrid, Spain
9. Montevideo, Uruguay
10. Miami, FL, United States

Top ten destination cities for travellers from Oceania
1. London, United Kingdom
2. Sydney, Australia
3. Melbourne, Australia
4. Singapore, Singapore
5. Perth, Australia
6. Brisbane, Australia
7. Auckland, New Zealand
8. San Francisco, CA, United States
9. Tokyo, Japan
10. New York, NY, United States

That wraps up this traveller outlook – wherever you’re headed this autumn, safe travels from all of The Dopplr Team.

We’ve introduced “guest passes” – for the times that you want to send a specific trip to someone whether they’re a member of Dopplr or those not using the service yet (future members, we prefer to call them!)

They’re super-simple to use.

Just click “Share this trip” next to any of your trips…

A “Share this trip” box will pop-up.

In here you can type the name of any Dopplr member you know (we’ll show you a list of your connections)

Or – an email address of someone you want to share the trip with – perhaps a colleague or a family member who’s not on Dopplr yet. Of course you can enter as many email addresses or user-names as you want.

You can even share a trip with a group on Dopplr (more about these soon…)

You can add a short message if you want to give the person or persons you’re going to share the trip with a little bit more context.

Once you’re happy – hit send, and we’ll issue a ‘guest pass’ to the trip in email to non-Dopplr users, like this:

Existing Dopplr users will get an entry in their journal calling attention to the trip you wanted to share.

Click on the ‘guest pass’ URL, and there’s the details of the trip with any notes that have been added to it.

Remember that notes can be seen by any Dopplr user, and anyone you share the trip with. If you want to store more sensitive information with your trip, we’d recommmend you use the private description field.

You’re in control of the guest passes – and can stop sharing the trip with individuals as you choose.

So – that’s a quick tour of our new guest pass feature.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the inspiration we took for the user-experience of this feature from our friends over the road at last.fm, and over the pond at flickr who have nailed this – if we’ve made something 5% as nice as them we’ll be happy.

But, mainly we hope it makes it easier for you to use Dopplr with people not on the service yet, and of course, spreads the word for making the travel smarter with Dopplr.

There are several places in Dopplr where we work hard behind the scenes to turn information that makes sense to people into data that makes sense to machines.

The most important one is where we interpret places and dates and turn them into trips. This is harder than it sounds, because over the centuries people have evolved an astonishing variety of ways of referring to place and time.

This was important recently when we launched our new SMS, Twitter and email features. We get quite a few requests for an explanation of how they work, so here’s a little insight.

The key to Dopplr’s ‘intelligence’ is learning from you and your fellow travellers over time.

For example, let’s say you’ve just joined Dopplr. You type ‘Paris’ into the Add A Trip form, and we look at the history of everyone’s trips from the last 18 months of our database and conclude that 99% of the time, that means “Paris, France”. However, if you’ve been using Dopplr for a while then we also look back at your own trip history. If you’ve previously been on a trip to “Paris, Texas” then that’s the default we’ll choose.

So the more trips you go on, the better we get to know you.

Incidentally, this ‘popularity content’ ranking of places has led to some lovely map visualisations and interesting statistics. If you haven’t seen them before, do look back in our blog at our Raumzeitgeist and Mid-2008 Travel Outlook posts.

When we’re scanning emails, twitters and text messages, we’ve got a few more factors to interpret. This time we’re looking for the dates of your trip as well as the place. We start with some complicated pattern matching which can spot a wide range of date formats in any prose it’s given. But of course most communication about travel mentions a lot of dates; for example, an airline confirmation might mention the date of a future change in luggage allowance.

Once we’ve got a candidate list of dates, we take a look at your traveller network to see if anyone who shares trips with you is going to the same place. If so, and the dates of their trips are similar to yours (within 24 hours or so) then we bump that date suggestion way up the list. If you and your friends or colleagues are going on the same holiday, conference trip or work visit, this works very effectively.

So the more people you share trips with, the better we get to know you.

For every email or twitter that we scan, we remember how you reacted to the result. If you confirm the trip, that’s a success for our system. If we guessed wrong but you chose one of our alternative suggestions, that’s a partial success. And if not, we failed. In any case, we add your message to the test suite we used to judge the quality of our engine, and use it to improve the results.

So the more messages you send us, the more we can improve our system and make it better for everyone.

This is Eli:

He mailed us and asked:

“I spend quite a bit of time in the winter months (oct – feb) at
McMurdo Station in Antarctica and that time is completely blank in my
dopplr timeline. could you please at least add all the US Antarctic
locations (McMurdo Station, South Pole Station, and Palmer Station).

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE! THANKS THANKS THANKS!”

So we added them to Dopplr!

Hopefully he’ll invite some of the other intrepid McMurdo travellers…

Looking forward to seeing what tips they add…

Our lovely new business cards, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Moo.com kindly let us be alpha-testers to their new business card range.

Of course, we couldn’t resist setting ourselves a technical challenge with the design to try and do something particularly ‘dopplresque’ with them.

Here’s MattB:

I’m particularly happy that Matt [J] made the design in Illustrator, then exported it as SVG, which I templated in Rails and produced personalised editions for each of us based on our travel data, which was then rasterized to PNG (using Batik) to go to print. It’s the future.

He had hoped to be able to give a few of them out at Reboot10, but unfortunately due to illness he’s had stay home.

So instead of making some announcements there this week, we’ll be doing them here on the dopplrblog instead…

Stay tuned!

Flying with Radar Badge on PMOG, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

GameLayer’s first product – the Passively-Multiplayer Online Game or “PMOG” launched this month, and we’re very proud to say we’re part of the game-grid.

Well, everything on the WWW is part of the game-grid for PMOG, as you play the game by simply using the web everyday – but advance your score and status in the game by exploring, creating and interacting with other players like you would in massive online game worlds like World of Warcraft.

Status-symbols in the game come in the form of achievement badges, and if you play PMOG and visit Dopplr.com once a week for a month, you’ll get the “Flying with Radar” shield you see above.

PMOG’s philosophy of serious play infecting the web is something we’re all for, and we were very proud to see them reference Dopplr as an example in their recent talk at Futuresonic08 in Manchester, where we were also talking about social tools and cities (slides coming soon!)


Congratulations to our friends at GameLayers on the launch of PMOG, and congratulations in advance to you if you earn a Dopplr PMOG badge!

We spotted a nice item in BusinessWeek about Dopplr, but unfortunately couldn’t find it online (yet). Click on the image to see it large enough to read the text…

A Sunday Times (London) magazine article today, entitled “The new dotcom boom“, discusses Dopplr among other companies, and has a great picture of Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones. The photo is only in the print edition, not the online one.

As MattB tells the newspaper, “We’re trying to recreate the joy of travel, rather than the queues and grief.”

Amongst the supposed chaos, Ben mailed us to ask if he was the first to snap our logo at the new Heathrow Terminal 5.

As far as we know, it is!

If you’ve taken a picture of our logo on your travels, let us know…