brampitoyo
commented
7 years ago Like Prox, a lot of apps and services want to give you a great day: the best places, the most hidden gems, the least traffic, a good time. But they all approach it differently.
AirBnB Guidebooks
To understand the best places to go in a city, AirBnB gets their hosts to manually compile a list and tag each item using these categories:
- Food Scene
- Restaurants
- Cafes or Coffee Shops
- Bakeries
- Drinks & Nightlife
- Nightclubs
- Bars
- Sightseeing
- Points of Interest
- Neighborhoods
- Parks & Nature
- Parks
- Beaches
- Arts & Culture
- Museums
- Art Galleries
- Schools or Universities
- Libraries
- Shopping
- Shopping Malls
- Clothing Stores
- Bookstores
- Stores
- Essentials
- Public Services
- Convenience Stores
- Grocery Stores
- Entertainment & Activities
- Movie Theatres
- Everything Else (stadiums, event centres, aquariums)
- Getting Around
- Public Transportation
- Car Rantal & Repairs
- Parking
- Everything Else
- Everything from a hotel to an abandoned building
To me, the leaf categories are less interesting than the parent ones. The parent categories are small enough to be useful (just 10, so you won’t get confused), yet broad enough to contain a lot of items (this is where bad things start to happen because there are a lot of places listed).
AirBnB Neighborhoods
Allows you to browse AirBnB listing by a well-defined neighbourhood boundary, instead of the whole city or a section of the map.
Each neighbourhood is tagged using these categories:
- Cultural enclaves
- Peace & Quiet
- Touristy
- Great Transit
- Shopping
- Dining
- Nightlife
- Trendy
- Loved by Locals
- Artsy
These neighbourhood categories are evocative. The filtering mechanism is meant to be a way to browse for places (that are in themselves not necessarily interesting) that are in proximity to other interesting things.
Lonely Planet Guides
It’s the Lonely Planet Guide we’re all familiar with, in digital form.
Things are organised in these categories:
- See
- Amusement Park, Aquarium, Archaeological Site, Theatre, Viewpoint, Zoo, etc.
- Eat
- African, Asian, Bakery, Bistro, Breakfast, Buffet, Burgers, Café, Tapas, Vegan, Vegetarian, Vietnamese, etc.
- Sleep
- Apartment, B&B, Boutique Hotel, Campground, Spa Hotel, etc.
- Shop
- Antiques, Arts & Crafts, Books, Ceramics, Shopping Centre, Toys, Wine, etc.
- Drink
- Bar, Beer Garden, Club, Teahouse, Wine Bar, etc.
- Play
- Amusement Park, Bathhouse, Cinema, Theatre, Traditional Music, Walking, etc.
It’s quite clear that you’re not supposed to browse too deeply into each child category because they’re organised in a haphazard way. But phrasing category name in action words like See, Eat and Sleep is a good idea.
Make My Day by Lonely Planet
The goal of this app should be apparent from its name. Make My Day tries to achieve this by picking a few great places in a city and allowing you to build a day-by-day itinerary by mixing and matching those places.
The sorting mechanism is pretty simple: by day, then by time. The places themselves don’t seem to be organised in any sort of way, but they must have been manually curated.
- Each place has at least one day, but you can create many more for your itinerary
- Each day has three time slots with interchangeable places
- Morning
- Afternoon
- Evening
I think the insight they’re getting to is important: it’s better to do fewer awesome things in one day, than scroll through a lot of alternatives and decide between a lot of hit-and-miss options.
And to take care of your meals at each place, on the bottom of each place card is a tooltip that tells you where to eat nearby.
Another important thing they’re getting to: you can view where each pin is related to each other on the map. There’s a missed opportunity here. There’s no setting that “make all my places line up, so I never have to turn back”. That’s a missed opportunity.
One more missed opportunity: you will most certainly end up travelling to all three corners of the city every day. A smart tour guide gets around this problem by planning their daily itineraries to centre around one or a few districts, instead of jumping around all over the city.
Routes and WunderWalk
People-curated places optimised for economy of movement.
Like Prox, Routes have got opening hours, transit time in minutes and place ratings from two different services. Unlike Prox, Routes have got a voting mechanism and no sensitivity to time or current location. If only there’s a way to algorithmically string together a series of interesting places customised to each user’s taste, but without the user needing to do a lot of work…
(Wunderwalk is similar to Routes)
Sidekix
If only there’s a way to algorithmically string together a series of places, you might get Sidekix.
Like Prox, Sidekix is sensitive to your current location and will only show you places that you can comfortably walk to (maximum of ~1 km away). Like Prox, Sidekix is machine-curated and has no user voting system.
But this is where Sidekix differs: when it determines your route, it won’t calculate the shortest route by default. Instead, it will try to get you to stop by many highly-rated – and hopefully hidden gems – places on the way to your destination.
These routes contain stopovers categorised under:
- Foodie
- Fashion
- Night Life
- Culture
- Artsy
So, really, when you pick a place to go to, you’re picking a final destination knowing that you’re about to be delighted by what you find along the way.
Sidekix also organises places by categories like Eat, Nightlife, Shopping, etc. – but we’ve seen this before in many other apps.
Honourable Mentions
These apps don’t quite fit into what Prox is trying to do, but they’re still worth reading about.
Tales & Tours
Less of a tour guide and more of a publishing platform for user-generated tour guides, but it’s got a business model. You download the app, open the city and purchase the guide for that city (some are free), which will then show locations pins on the map.
These digital tour guides ranges from “Guide to Gyms”, “Convicts & Colonials”, to “Sagrada Família”, and are put in only a few categories:
- Walking
- Cycling
- On a Boat
- By Car
- Boat
- Indoor (usually for just one place)
- Quest
The one takeaway from this app may be to figure out an incentive for users to finding hidden gems themselves, instead of relying on the internet to find them. Take this suggestion with a grain of salt, as this is getting into the social network territory.
Detour
Detour is also a publishing platform, but to create “location-based audio experiences”.
This means three things:
- Location-sensitive audio (for example, a street walking guide, a museum guide)
- Nearby audio (for example, things to do or artworks near you)
- Syncing with friends (so you can all take the tour at the same time)
Inquire
Inquire finds Wikipedia articles of nearby places, thus allowing you to discover interesting things near you (and hopefully visit it). This is practically similar to the demo @antlam created in London!
@antlam wrote:
There’s no Trello card for this issue yet, because all we have for the moment is a user problem.