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.

Did you know that there’s a special Dopplr user on Twitter that is there only to receive messages from you, which then get turned into trips on Dopplr? You can send it a private message by twittering something like “D dopplr a trip to Helsinki on May 19th until May 23rd”, or you can also use the “@dopplr” prefix if you don’t mind the details being seen in ‘public’ on twitter.

How does it work? First, you have to follow dopplr user on Twitter and register your Twitter username with us. We check twitter regularly using their API for your messages. Then, like our other methods of automatically receiving trips (like email or SMS), we process your twitters using a heuristic method of scanning for cities and dates, influenced by your trip history.

It works well for simple return trips. If you’re going on a trip with many stops, we’ve got a sophisticated multi-stop trip editor on the website for you.

Look in your account settings for details of how to turn this feature on.

Over the summer we’ve been working hard to create Groups on Dopplr.

There will be a few stages to this, and the first we’re ready to introduce is the groups feature for companies and corporations, which we launched at dConstruct08.

^ image by Matt Locke

Overall – groups are a way to share trips with people who might not be in your Dopplr network yet, but would share a common interest around the trips you place in those groups. Specifically, in this first stage of our roll-out of groups, that common interest equates to the companies we work for.

What do I mean?

Well – imagine the trip as a “social object” you can place into a group for anyone who is a member of that group to see. For instance, say I worked for SuperDuperBigCo, and was going on a business trip to Tokyo.

Everyone in my Dopplr network would see the trip as per usual – but if I chose to place the trip in the SuperDuperBigCo group then anyone in the group could see it, including members of the group who I don’t share trips with currently.

So, coincidences with other SuperDuperBigCo staff who have placed their trips to Toyko in the group would be highlighted to me, even if I don’t yet share trips with that colleague.

Discovering someone else from my company is going to be there might make my trip more productive, more fun – or both!

It might even mean I change my trip to make it more valuable if I was going on company business, or, in some cases it might mean I discover I don’t have to travel at all.

We think that company groups are a pretty powerful tool for optimising travel.

You certainly don’t have to put every trip into a group, for instance, personal trips; but you can opt to make placing a trip into a group or groups your default setting – which might save you time if most of your travel is on company business.

The group ‘home’ has an overview of the individual activity and trips placed with the group, and also has some other interesting features based on the aggregate behaviour of the group.

For instance: group carbon (calculated by aggregating information from those in the group who have declared their carbon profile sharable), a ‘raumzeitgeist’ view of the group’s travels, an upcoming trip activity ’seismograph’ and a historical chart of top destinations of the group.

We’ll be adding more features and data-toys over time. If there’s anything you think would be particularly useful to you as a group, do let us know on our Get Satisfaction Forum.

Here’s a screenshot of our (i.e. Dopplr Ltd’s) group home.

You might have received a message from us over the weekend if you’re registered with Dopplr with an email address belonging to one of the companies we’ve created a group for.

The initial list of companies is below – we’ve based it on the Dopplr100 list that we created last year, but if your company would like a group, let us know.

When you visit the company group page, we’ll ask you to verify you have a valid email address belonging to the company.

Don’t worry if your Dopplr account isn’t registered with that email address – as long as you can receive a validation code at your company email address it’s fine.

More on groups in the coming weeks… Stay tuned!

Continue reading…

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.

This is part of series of posts reviewing things we found from our recent user-survey. One of the things you told us was that it should be easy to discover people on Dopplr. We’re going to continue to improve our search engine, so that you can find people you know are using Dopplr already – but that’s just part of the picture.

We call Dopplr a social tool – that is to say, something that gets more useful the more people you share it with. The benefits of safely sharing information and creating ‘social objects’ with people we trust is one of the most exciting things about the web.

However, we’re all getting pretty tired of telling computers over and over again who we trust, when probably there’s the same core list of people you communicate with on each new service.

We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to use your existing social networks in Dopplr, both in terms of finding people already using Dopplr and sharing trips with them – and inviting those who don’t yet use it to join.

By going to “Find and invite”, you can do just that to find contacts across Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and LinkedIn – which has been especially popular and useful for finding the people you trust with your travel information.

Soon, we’re going to introduce a new feature that will keep Dopplr ’synchronised’ with your other social networks, so it will be easy to add connections that you’ve made with other tools.

Also, for those of you developing services or tinkering with code, we’ve taken what we use behind our “find and invite” feature and open-sourced it here.

While of course we hope more and more people start to benefit from using Dopplr, unlike some services, we won’t send email or messages to anyone without your permission. All we want to do is make Dopplr more useful to you – by fitting it into your existing online life.

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.

One of the most-requested things we hear from your feedback is “can you automate how I get my trip information into Dopplr”.

We agree that entering stuff by hand is not great.

Look! I’m doing it right now!

It’s horrible!

However, Dopplr is about your future, which, as far as we know can’t be automated (yet) and if you’re trying to optimise your travel plans before you book stuff, we need to get the information from other places, including plain-old human input.

We try to make every effort to ensure that it’s as painless as possible in the UI to enter your trips, but as always if you have any specific ideas or criticism about that, that would be great.

BUT!

We’re always working on a bunch of ways to get your information into Dopplr easily.

First up we worked on easy ways to get the information into Dopplr from your calendaring software – like Google Calendar and Apple iCal. So that if you’ve entered it once there, you don’t have to enter it again.

AND!

Today I’m really happy to say we’re taking the wraps off a number of new ways to get your future into Dopplr and share your travel information with those you trust: Dopplr by Twitter, SMS and… Email!

First up…

Twitter

You can now add trips easily on Dopplr using a Twitter account.

There’s a special Dopplr ‘robot’ user on Twitter that is there only to receive messages from you, which then get turned into trips on Dopplr.

Once you’ve gone through a simple procedure to associate your Twitter account with your Dopplr username, you’ll be able to start using this feature.

You can send it a message by twittering something like

“D dopplr a trip to Helsinki on May 19th until May 23rd”

or you can also use the “@dopplr” prefix if you don’t mind the details being seen in ‘public’ on twitter.

The only constraint is we ask you to make sure to mention a placename and two dates, including the month both times.

For example:

• A trip to Helsinki on May 19 to May 23
• At SFO on September 9th. Leaving on September 20th
• I’m going to Austin on July 15 for 3 nights

Secondly…

SMS

Similarly to Twitter, you’ll have to go through a simple procedure for us to associate your mobile number with your Dopplr account, but after that you can send SMS messages with a place and a date or range of dates, and Dopplr will do the rest.

And, again, our only constraint is we ask you to make sure to mention a placename and two dates, including the month both times.

Third, and finally…

Email!

Yes – EMAIL! Who-hoo!

*ahem*

Dopplr can interpret messages you send us via email into trips and other details associated with your travels.

Again, You can send us simple messages like:

“I’ll be in San Francisco from August 18th for 4 days”

or you can forward your e-tickets, itineraries or other confirmation emails you’ve received from airlines or hotels.

The latter will create trips on Dopplr, and they’ll be stored as private attachments so you can keep all your travel arrangements in one place.

What’s more, once you’ve made a trip you can send anything you’d like associated with your destination and time you’ll be there – for instance: hotel reservations or car-rental confirmations – and they’ll get attached to it.

The trip becomes like a little inbox for anything you send that we can identify by the same place and date-range.

Just send us messages to trips@dopplr.com from the email address you originally registered with Dopplr and we’ll do the rest.

Behind all of this is an engine we’ve been developing to do what you mean from whatever you send us.

For more on that, here’s MattB with his by-now-traditional ‘science bit’:

There are an awful lot of ways to format a travel itinerary. When people asked us to extract trips from emails, we looked at our long history of e-tickets, confirmations and reservations, and scratched our heads.

Inspiration came in the shape of Apple’s last OS X release, Leopard, and an intriguing feature called “Data detectors“.

We realised that instead of creating a piece of code to decode every email format out there, we could look for patterns of dates and place names in the text (and later, other information too) and turn those into trips.

A happy side-effect of this approach is that as well as extracting information from automatic reservation emails, it works well with short text strings like “I’ll be in San Francisco from 3rd July to 7th July”. This means we can work with many hand-written emails, with Twitters, and with SMSes too.

Of course it won’t work with every variation under the sun (for example, it’s most reliable when an email contains just a return trip in a single hop), but we’ve had very satisfying results in our testing. And of course every email you send us will be added to our test suite so that our engine can get better and better over time.

So – three new ways to tell Dopplr and your network about your plans and optimise your trips. As always, do let us know what you think and how we can improve them.

We’ve got some big plans for the engine in coming months, which hopefully will make it a lot easier for you get the most out of your future travel.

How does Dopplr know which city you mean when you type in your destination? It looks up the name in a database, and tries to find a match. We have information on over 150,000 world cities but several travellers have asked for better coverage. So we’ve been doing some work behind the scenes to improve it.

It’s difficult to get the location right every time, for lots of reasons; partly because the same place name might be spelt differently in different languages; partly because there are many places that share the same name.

We call our database “the gazetteer”. We’ve been adding new technology to make it work smarter, including data from a free service called Geonames. Geonames makes this possible by kindly licensing their data using a Creative Commons license.

Our aim is to add all the cities Geonames knows to our gazetteer. We’re adding 100,000 new cities every day, and will keep doing so until we’ve got information on 2.4 million places around the globe.

We’re also including destinations that aren’t cities – things like islands, national parks, and ski resorts. So in future, Dopplr is more likely to recognise names of places you’re travelling to. We’ve made other changes to the gazetteer too, tweaks to the way it guesses which destination you mean when lots of locations share the same name.

Finally, we’re now taking a nightly data feed from Geonames, which means that newly added or edited cities will also be incorporated into our database. So if there’s a place you care about that isn’t in Dopplr, you could help us and the whole Geonames community by going to Geonames and contributing the information.

This smarter, faster gazetteer will hopefully make Dopplr easier to use. Please contact us if you have any questions about it.

As I mentioned in the previous post, a lot of you have been asking for the ability to add ‘multi-stop’ trips, that is – trips where you’ll be hitting a number of destinations before you return home.

We’ve added this now, with a tweak to our ‘Add trip’ interface that I’ll illustrate below.

So, first of all – after clicking ‘add a trip’ on Dopplr, you see our new, slightly-tweaked ‘Add trip’ form:

You’ll notice that there’s a new link beneath the date field for the start of the trip – “Add another stop on this trip”

Clicking that does what it says on the tin, and gives you another destination field to put the next stop on your trip into.

You can click the “X” by the side of this new line of destination and starting date to get rid of it if you’ve added one-too-many stops in your excitement!

The more eagle-eyed amongst you will have already spotted that the dates advance on automatically by a day every stop you add to the trip. Of course you can manually alter these to reflect your itinerary.

If you enter a date by accident that is out of order, we’ll ask you to check and replace it with a date the same as or after the date of your previous stop.

Dopplr takes the causal violation of spacetime seriously…

Once you’re happy with the shape of your multi-stop trip, add it to Dopplr in the normal way by clicking “Add trip” – we’ll generate trip pages for each of the stops on your trip, but they will be connected together as ‘related trips’.

We’ll be adding more special formatting and functionality related to ‘related trips’ (!) in the near future.

A Dopplr user who might find this new feature very handy is Rebecca, the Skype Nomad

She’s travelling the world, and along with a bunch of other social tools, she’s using Dopplr to find coincidences with fellow travellers along the way. If you’re a Dopplr member you can find her at http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/skypenomad

Right – enough tasty sprinkles for now. Time for me to get back to plotting the next lot of goodness for you lovely people with MattB…

Remember, in the mean-time, if you’ve got thoughts on new stuff you’d like to see on Dopplr, or feedback for how we could improve it for you, zoom along to our forum on Get Satisfaction…

—–
Update, 22nd May 2008: We’ve had some feedback that Multi-stop trips are not displaying on Microsoft IE6 – this is unfortunately true.

After a lot of blood,sweat and tears we haven’t found a satisfactory way of implementing them on IE6, so we took the decision to disable the feature in that browser. I’m sure this is frustrating to many of you – it’s certainly very frustrating for us.

We realise lots of you don’t have the choice to change browser or upgrade, and as a result are stuck with IE6, so we’re going to do what we can to find a work-around for you – MJ

Everyone hates to enter data twice. A few weeks ago we added a feature that lets you update Dopplr from a Google calendar. Now we’re happy to help you update Dopplr via your Apple Macintosh desktop iCal calendar. Here’s how:

In your iCal calendar, create a new calendar and name it something such as “Travel” or “Dopplr travel” or whatever you like:

Now create a new event in that calendar:

Double click (or click Command-I) the event that now shows up in your calendar and fill in the appropriate information:

This part is important to get right. It helps a great deal if you enter the location information precisely, or Dopplr may guess wrong and create the wrong location on the Dopplr site (which would be bad for serendipity with your trusted friends and colleagues). Remember that Dopplr works with the place names of cities and towns, so make sure you don’t put in a full street address or other details.

In the example above, we’ve created a marketing meeting on June 2-4, 2008, in the windy city of Chicago, which is in Illinois in the U.S. Notice that we wrote “Chicago, IL, United States” — not because Dopplr would be likely to get that particular city wrong but rather to illustrate how we recommend you enter the place name. (If you enter a simple city name and we get it wrong in Dopplr, don’t worry — you can fix it, and we’ll tell you how below.)

Also in this example, we’ve put in a note, “Make sure ad rep is there” as a reminder to ourselves. It and the title of the event “Marketing meeting” will be published on Dopplr, but only in your private trip notes there. In other words, nothing you create in your personal calendar — apart from the dates and places — will be viewable by your Dopplr fellow travellers.

OK, click “Done” and the trip will show up in your calendar. Then go to the menu and select Calendar-Publish:

You’ll see the box below. Select “Publish on: a Private Server” from the pull-down item.

Of the options in Publish calendar, Dopplr cares only about one: “Publish titles and notes.” While you may have selected the others, and may well use them in your desktop calendar, they won’t have any effect in Dopplr. You may also want to check “Publish changes automatically” so you won’t forget to update; the only disadvantage is that Dopplr may first record a trip to “New Event” before you finish entering the details, but that’s ok, because when you do finish it’ll update.

When you select “a Private Server” you’ll see this input box:

OK, now go to your Dopplr page and be sure you’re logged into your account. Click on “Your account” at the top and then on “Import trips from external calendars” on the page where we have various account settings. (direct link)

Near the end of that page you’ll see a paragraph that says:

Alternatively, you can publish a calendar from iCal to the following private server URL (no username or password required):
https://www.dopplr.com/upload/[and a long set of letters and numbers]…./

Copy that link into the Private Server address in the iCal form (we smudged the url but you get the idea):

Apple insists on a username and password. Make something up; you don’t need to put in your Dopplr username/password, as we don’t require it for this step. But you do need to type in something.

Click “Publish” and you’re done. You’ll see a note before you get back to iCal telling you how to let people know if you want them to be able to subscribe to this calendar outside of Dopplr (though we confess we’re not sure why you’d want to do that).

Now you’re set. In iCal, make sure to “Refresh” the exported calendar — right-click on the travel calendar you’re exporting and choose “Refresh” to update our server. (Remember, you can also tell iCal to “Publish changes automatically”.)

Now go back to your Dopplr page. Voila, the trip(s) should be there, as below:

When you click “More details on this trip” you find, in the private note — not the one seen by fellow travellers — the notes you put into iCal when you created the trip. You can still add a note for them to see in the “Add note” box at the bottom of the trip page.

Important: We strongly recommend that you edit trip dates and places only in iCal (or other external calendar). If you edit in Dopplr you’ll break the link back to the external calendar, and there’s nothing we can do to fix that.

If Dopplr does bring in the wrong place name, we recommend that you fix it this way:

Click the “Edit this trip” link (on the right in the above image). Let’s imagine we really intended to go to a different Chicago (and had put it in the original iCal trip as just “Chicago,” which Dopplr would interpret to be the big Illinois city as the most likely candidate. Type “Chicago” (without the quotes) in the Destination: field and wait a couple of seconds. You’ll see some activity followed by this screen:

This invites you to see other places called Chicago, and gives you a link to click to see them. Click it and you’ll see this:

Copy the name of the city you actually intended — in this case we’ll choose Chicago Heights, IL, United States — into your clipboard. Copy just the text, not the hyperlink. Now — very very important — cancel your edit. Do not click the “Done” button.

Next, go back to iCal and paste in the correct city name. Like this:

Click “Done” and the iCal trip event will be updated. So will Dopplr:

We wish we could make this part easier. But iCal and other external calendars tend to publish in one direction only.

Let us know how it works for you. We’ll be adding tweaks and fixes.