Context
Human lives revolve around places. Places to experience food, places of worship, places for vacationing, places to experience an adventure, and on and on it goes.
Consider you are in Mumbai and want to experience Vada Pav, how do you know which place to visit? You Google ‘Best Vada Pav in Mumbai’, you get a list and you check the reviews starting from the ones closest to you - you do this either on Google Search or Google Maps. In Maps you will likely do ‘Best Vada Pav near me’. Another option is asking a friend - a referral. If a friend tells you go to this place in Mumbai for best Vadapav - you don’t care about the reviews or how far is it - referrals skip the need for reviews and distance, but you’ll still search the place to check the ambience, or if there is enough parking for your car, or is it open at this time or not. If it is a restaurant, you’ll anyway need to search and reserve a table.
Search is simply inevitable! And when it comes to places there are thousands of subjects to search upon. How many apps do you currently use for searching places? How much time do you invest in searches about places? Can we modularise search for places?
This is where this idea is about, “Bringing efficiency, efficacy, and joy in Search for Places”.
Objectives
How many apps do you use for searching places?
- Browsers - to find a lists for a query like “best saloon in town” (webpages with a mix of structured and unstructured information) — Time Consumed = HIGH
- Google Maps - for navigation, ambience, reviews, timings — Time Consumed = MEDIUM to HIGH
- Socials - Instagram and Youtube for discovery, vibe, ambience, sharing — Time Consumed = MEDIUM
- Specific Apps - zomato for reservations and menus; district, luma, and bms for events; mmt and tripadvisor for vacations — Time Consumed = LOW to MEDIUM, as it has structured content with filters on easy UIs
Objective 1: Improve efficiency in searches for places, reduce time consumed while preserving the flexibility to search anywhere on web, socials, or thousands of specific apps
How effective are your searches?
- Finding answers to your specific questions - A place which is a hidden gem or not touristy enough may not have certain questions answered or might be difficult to find those answers. A place which is very well known may have answers differing widely leading to vagueness. — Chances of Inefficacy = LOW to MEDIUM
- How accurate are the answers that you get - Hotel Sandeep in Dattawadi Pune known for mutton speciality does not have the best ratings on google, but turned out good in actual experience. Another hotel in Pimple Gurav had good reviews, but few of my friends experienced food poisoning. — Chances of Inefficacy = MEDIUM to HIGH
- Do the answers help you reach to a conclusion - Are you able to summarize the answers and conclude, are you able to share the answers to reach group conclusions, are you able to structure the unstructured answers, are you able to visualise to reach faster conclusions. — Chances of Inefficacy = MEDIUM to HIGH
Objective 2: Improve efficacy in searches for places, get accurate and consistent answers - track real experiences through continuous learning techniques
What makes planning fun?
- Curiosity to explore digitally - acts as a warmup/hype to actual physical exploration. Videos and images work the best. Concise and structured texts work best for details. — Accessibility = GOOD, social media makes digital exploration very accessible
- The want for predictability - humans feel safe and confidant when expectations are predictable on an overall scale. This varies however subjectively - people also like having spontaneous plans, but spontaneity is only fun as a subset of predictability - imagine going to a resort to find it completely booked! — Accessibility = FAIR, real time traffic, weather, crowds, pollution, disaster data availability
- Completing tasks - Planning a trip is full of small tasks, completing each of them releases accomplishment hormones. Fixing a date with friends, booking the travel tickets, booking the stay tickets, finalising the destinations, etc. — Accessibility = FAIR, some tasks are easy while others like bookings can be tedious
- Expecting desire fulfilment - expecting physical and mental desires like having great food, experiencing culture, the thrill and uncertainty of an adventure, the accomplishment in a sport, being socially extroverted. Conditioning the plans to maximise desire expectations. — Accessibility = BAD to FAIR, BAD in terms of specific bitesized desires, like living in a hotel with beach access and the beach should have certain degree of privacy and no pollution. FAIR in terms of generic desires like having a fish thali in Goa.
Objective 3: Optimize for The Fun in planning through a User Interface and Experience that itself is a great value proposition