Wanderfly – Re-inventing travel through design
“Good design makes a product useful. Good design helps a product be understood. Good design is as little design as possible.” Three quotes from Dieter Rams that the team at Wanderfly has taken to heart. Wanderfly is a new, sleek & cleanly articulated travel inspiration experience. Sites in the tourism and travel industry are typically bogged down with content and packing every last bit of information on a page which bombards your senses. Wanderfly takes a simplistic approach to help the user navigate throughout their travel exploration.
On the homepage you’re greeted with beautiful vistas from various locations across the globe. In the center is your key to the recommendation engine. (the engine features 1,200 destinations worldwide and content from over 20 best-in-class brands such as Expedia, Foursquare, Yelp and Lonely Planet) Simple content with easy to understand objectives. No crazy drop downs or tons of information to make your brain explode here.
Easy to fill out content like:
• your leaving from location
• how much you can spend
• dates of your travels
• where to
• things you’re interested in while you’re there.
Think of this as the Google homepage version of travel sites. Clean, simple, easy to follow.
“This is a tool to help simplify travel inspiration.” Christy Liu said (wanderflys director of marketing & co-founder) “70% of people don’t know where to go when they want to travel”.
The inside pages are just as simple. With clearly laid out controls, clear functionality and great social networking integrations Wanderfly brings a useful travel experience back to the user. You can navigate between the travel locations that you’ve been given as well as see what activities have been suggested for you from places like foursquare and yelp. There is also a grid view that allows you to see many locations at once. Connecting with your Facebook account allows you to see if you have any friends in the cities you are thinking about visiting.
Wanderfly’s team didn’t formally come from the travel industry. They used this to their distinct advantage when it came to creation of the site. They were not exposed to a status quo for “what a travel site should look like”. They designed the site as travelers for travelers which, turned into a simple experience with an eye on content. This was extremely helpful because they’re not tied to any design trends. A few shadows and gradients here and there but, most of the content is presented with simple colors, beautiful photos and meaningful content with action buttons to get your trip booked and explore new places.
From an industry where loads of content needs to be streamlined and relayed to the users as simple and effectively as possible; Wanderfly delivered. Whether they consciously consulted Dieter Rams philosophies before creating this site or not is hard to say. However, they did create this site with clear objectives and a streamlined interface. As a side effect they are inspiring travelers everywhere to discover new experiences through revolutionary user experience and personalized suggestions.
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Chad Engle is currently slaying pixels @BoomtownROI. He abides in coastal Charleston, SC and enjoys living on an island. You should follow, harass or chat to him on twitter @chadengle and @fuelcreativity .
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This is a great user experience, in terms of usability there is little too fault… the fun UI makes you want to tweak its sliders and interact with its icons.
But…..
This site completely misses the point, online travellers don’t want one recommended price – they want to dip in and out of hotels that other users rate (tripadvisor), they want to find the cheapest possible flights (lastminute), they want to see all of the hotels in their price bracket (expedia).
Wanderfly scores 9/10 on usability, but 2/10 on point of existence.
Totally agree about the UI & UX of the site! It’s fun to click through all the options.
The services you listed are already in exsistance for the pointa that you made. Wanderfly is tehre to give you ideas of where you can travel and book it one neat, tidy package. It’s meant to show you multiple places in the price point/timeline you punched in. If you’re tired of going to the same places on vacation Wanderfly is there for you.
Maybe I’m letting my own personal preferences cloud my judgement, but the internet is about depth of choice… if wanderfly harvested more personal details from me, it may lead to a more suitable recommendation… one that I trusted.
But price, place and vague categories is far too shallow.
I was recently in Morocco windsurfing, I chose a village steeped in Jewish history with strong winds and good weather.
Before that I was hiking in Sicily in a mountain village, chosen because it had remained unchanged since the Middle Ages.
A service like wanderfly is unlikely to have supported such specific needs with its minimal user input… Maybe I’m alone in having many demands from my ‘personal’ breakaway, but looking at the depth of sites that serve people like myself – I don’t think I am.
Recommending a holiday tailored to the individual is a great idea, the usability of this site is smoking… but it just lacks that vital ingredient I look for when booking a holiday: depth.
Personally, I love the UI. It is the emergence of sites like these which I believe are changing the face of the web and business. UI is pushing innovation. There are not many times in history where business opportunity has stemmmed from consumer need for new ways to view information.
As far as product, I agree with Joseph. I said the exact same thing when I looked at the ‘account page’ – of all the sites that want to know stuff about me… Travel sites are ones that I actually spend the time to fill out. Especially if I believe it will help in the refining process.
However I do think they are ’starting’ right. This is a newly launched site. If they continue innovating with design while finding ways to integrate personal data… then they really have something.
Great stuff.. smart designs..
Great travel blog web design, easy navigation too, it’s a one-stop shop! I travel a lot and will really try it out! I can’t wait.
OK,
It looks awsome… but can’t you drag the sliders??
Also its UI is realy slow on this end. Wich makes the
experiance not as enjoiable as it could have been.
C