I have to point you to this ABC.com video coverage of Yahoo! Trip Planner. Too cool. Of all the press we’ve received since releasing Trip Planner, I feel like the ABC piece is the most articulate - without talking about features.
It is no secret that Yahoos are involved with regularly occurring Hack Days. When I first started at the company, I participated in a Y! Travel Hack Day - yes, we designers (and all team members) are just as involved in designing the hacks as the engineers that code them. The hack that came from my first Hack Day endeavor was a Yahoo! Widget (a.k.a. Konfabulator widget) for FareChase.
My team of three spent about three hours designing it, four or five hours coding it, and that was that… we thought. Not bad for a day’s work.
The hack was passed around to various people in the company, and it quickly snowballed into a request for a real, living breathing widget. So after six months of politicking, red tape, tweaking, and backend engineering, Yahoo! released the FareChase widget Version 1.0.1a without much fanfare on July 8. We have had a couple thousand downloads at this point, and would love your feedback!
What does it do? The Widget finds the lowest air prices from dozens of travel sites for you and brings them right to your desktop. Hey, we are a lazy bunch, and prefer things to come to us - and now you can benefit from our laziness as well!
Today, Yahoo! Travel brought Trip Planner out of beta. There has been a ton of press coverage today, which is quite exciting. To see folks write about my work in Forbes, and in many national and international newspapers, online news outlets, and in the blogosphere (the most important outlet!) simply stokes my fire.
Some people would say that Y! has bet the farm on social media, and I say that it is an exciting place to be right now. Greg Sterling ponders today, “in many ways it’s the most impressive expression to date of Yahoo!’s social media strategy. Yahoo! Answers has received a great deal of attention recently (there’s an Answers integration with Travel) but the new Trip Planner is more fully realized as a product.” I think Greg hits the nail on the head, and there is only more smart, focused integration of Yahoo properties (in Travel and elsewhere) on the way. If the press and PR folks are missing some points, I would have to say that Trip Planner is focused on SIMPLICITY, and very concise, progressive disclosure of functionality. It doesn’t overwhelm, but hopefully it is helpful in all the right places. We also took great pains toward personalizing the experience based on other actions you have taken within Yahoo Travel and elsewhere - but that’s a hard topic and concept for the PR engine to spin, so you’ll have to read it here. 
While much of the trip creation process of Trip Planner existed when I started at Yahoo back in December, I led the design for many of the new features in Trip Planner, including the ability to explore geo-coded trips across the world. Rather than go into detail describing all of the features and new-skool Yahoo! coolness, I’ll just point you to the Trip Planner home page; go plan a trip!
To the Trip Planner team, I’m proud of the work we’ve done, and can’t wait to get started on Trip Planner 2.0. The Trip Planner engineers are amazing, and thanks to my fellow designers for all of the great feedback, idea generation, and help in bringing focus to the product (and the sweet visual design). There is so much to do still, and I look forward to seeing where we can take it.
Update: Be sure to check out Ivanka Trump’s Trip Plan to Dubai!
It’s no secret: I am a bicycling nut. And of late, my tastes have turned very much toward the classic, bird-like lugged steel frames of a time gone by. I guess my techno-centric work life pushes me toward a personal life of dirt, twine, shellac, and other things that can not be had from the confines of a digital device.
There is a fellow named Chris Kulczycki, who via his Velo Orange blog, has begun to build a classic cyclo-touring business by interacting directly with his customers, and potential customers. The recent post that really struck me as interesting - and ballsy - was this one. Chris asks an open-ended question which has sparked a fervent rash of comments, requests, and of course, doubt. He asks with confidence, “Now don’t get excited, but what if Velo Orange had frames made?” He then lists a few core piece of his frame idea, and finishes his post with, “What else would you want to see on this imaginary frame?”
This is the most concrete example I’ve seen of watching a person build a business, and more importantly, getting explicit and public feedback from his *potential* customers to influence his product design decisions - all via his blog (and probably email).
Are there other interesting examples of this type of thing out there?
Oh, and I have to point you to the Velo Orange store to see the beautiful collection of hand-made bicycling goods that Chris is designing.
It was only a matter of time before designers would start misusing the tag cloud form factor to represent an information architecture. Two that come to mind as I write this are CollectiveX and Yahoo Tech.
There is an inherent problem in using tags (or tag clouds) to make up for your IA laziness. Tags were born from a need to add findability value, insight, and delight to the giant mountains of information that pile up in online communities - they are the Library Science antithesis of a Taxonomy. They are sloppy. They aren’t controlled. They aren’t top-down. They are generated by the people for other people to discover - or not. I hate to say the words, but they go hand in hand with User-Generated Content. They are the DNA of folksonomies.
When designers or companies come along, and take something that, for the past few years has been The User-Generated Lighthouse at the Point of Information Overload, and turn it into a cheap way to navigate a controlled corporate vocabulary, we have to question their intent, or perhaps their lack of intent.
I especially wonder about the decision to place a tag cloud form factor in web sites/apps where there is a huge amount of comingled editorial and user-generated content - for the purpose of navigation of the designer’s Information Architecture. Was it done for the sake of being Web2.0? Was it done because structured navigation has become passé? Was it simply done without an argument for why it should be there? In the case of Yahoo! Tech the purpose of the tag cloud changes depending on your context. On the home page it is top level categories. Inside a category it represents popular searches withtin that category. Eh?
I certainly believe that editorial content and authentic media can coexist in the same information space. In fact I would say that they are symbiotic in many ways - a system of checks and balances. But designers need to question harder their motives to use certain form factors in user interfaces. And in the case of tags, tag clouds, and tagging, keep your Information Architecture out of my tags.