Bringfido.com's Map Duality
Over the summer. I worked for three months on helping Bringfido.com, a pet friendly travel booking site where all listings allow pets to stay in the space, improve their design and make it more aesthetically and functionally pleasing. I did this by scouring the internet for all the travel sites I could find and evaluate their positive and negative features (It ended up being 19 pages with pictures, I can show anyone who cares to see it). This was an interesting way to encounter a case study that incorporated both good design features and frequently clunky interactions. I am going to relay a single feature that is a fantastic example of both!
Bringfido.com managed to do some novel things that even the bigger sites wouldn't try. The most notable was the map method of searching for a destination. It not only allowed for exclusively finding a location through the map itself, but if it was moved by the user with search results on the page, it would live update the results based on the currently viewed geographical location. Another impressive feature was localized advertisements. If I were looking at a place to stay in Charlotte, the ads would only show businesses that were in the Charlotte area. They wouldn't be travel ads either, but rather dog kennels, parks, groomers, and other places people with pets would actually use while there. This is a direct extension of holistic design in that the designers thought not just of the service it is providing, but thought about what the user will need throughout the entire travel experience.
However, this map is a source of agony for everyone in that office for a number of reasons. For one, it takes up the majority of the screen as soon as you traverse to the search results page. If your mouse is anywhere over the 75% of the screen the map occupies, it will instantly zoom out with the intensity and speed of a space shuttle. This will result in completely changing the search results and losing the results you were looking for. Every. Single. Time. On top of that, the listings it shows are never really complete. If you were to zoom in farther, you are greeted with many more qualifying results. While this specific flaw isn't inherently awful, it does make for an annoyance when you have already booked a hotel only to find one later that is closer to where you want for much cheaper. This strange duality of innovation and glaring oversights makes for an interesting case study on how a single aspect of a site can be both positive and negative at the same time for the user.
So are you saying that every time the user would search a relevant map of the area would appear in the search results and if the user changes location the search will remember the result?
ReplyDeleteIf thats the case, I think that is giving the user too much power. Sure its great to allow Users to search the map for a different location but to save their result for later searches is falling into the "User is not always right" design principle. They don't know exactly what they want or what the effect of their actions are doing to the system.
If it doesn't update your later searches, then I think it is a great way to allow users the freedom to look around surrounding areas and get a feel for the region or where they are going to. Good luck figuring out the zoom though.
It seems to me through my experience with web design that the developers or the people at the company really had their couple features that they really wanted to highlight on the website. Since they really wanted these features they inadvertently threw them at the customers face to a point that the website became harder to operate. I can totally see why though, that the company did fail to include the entire package by offering other services in the area.
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