* TripHub attempts to help you plan your trip
Trying to organize people for a trip or an event is a task only suitable for the patient and tolerant because trying to get more than two people clued in about the agenda, accommodations, flights, and events to be attended as well as getting them to confirm their involvement is, to use an old analogy, like herding cats.
This is a problem that a Web application should be able to make a major impact on. The combination of access from anywhere combined with e-mail notifications and confirmations, relevant affiliate offers, and advertising should make it easy to keep track of the who, what, where, and when of even complex events as well as generate revenue. A new service, TripHub aims to do all of that and a little more but … well, we’ll come back to that in a moment.
After you register with TripHub you’ll find a clean user interface with a menu of facilities down the left hand side of the screen while the middle of the screen displays data about the trip and the right hand side shows ads.
The facilities menu is divided into three sections: The first section is Trip Tools which includes Invite people, Trip blog (so that the group can discuss the trip details), Event schedule, Accommodations, Flight plans, Send message (so you can notify the group about changes), Who’s coming, Trip details, Guest settings, Delete this trip, and Planning resources (which links to affiliates that can provide relevant services). So far, so good.
The next section is My TripHub which includes My travel plans, Share accommodations, Share flights, My RSVP and guests, My privacy settings, My account and trips, and Start a new trip and the last section, Shop, which covers Shop for hotels, Shop for flights, Shop for activities, and Rent a car (this section is essentially a duplicate of many of the services under Planning resources in the first section).
So to test the service I tried to set up a trip for my family – we’re going to London this October and one of our party lives four hours away so it seemed to be a good test. I entered the basic trip details such as name, dates, and group member e-mail addresses then entered the flight details.
Overall the service’s responsiveness seemed highly variable as if the server load was causing problems (my connection wasn’t to blame – I run traffic monitors so I know that there was nothing “bad” going on).
The user interface also has some silly usability problems. For example, the pop-up calendars for date picking are slow and there is no click and drag to select the trip’s date range. Another issue is that if you select a single day in the start date calendar the end date calendar doesn’t update to select the start date as the default (this is a pain if you are planning a few months ahead).
The user interface makes no use of AJAX or any other rich interface techniques, which seems an odd omission given that “polish” and local application-like performance is becoming evermore important in attracting users.
Those are arguably minor issues but once you get deeper into the service you start to find the real warts. There are some more ridiculous omissions such as no way to delete accommodation details. I needed to do this because I entered the details and then couldn’t find them to assign to individuals as I had done with the flights. I wound up recreating the accommodation entry several times and then found the duplicates and couldn’t figure out how to remove them.
There’s also no way to assign accommodation to specific people: I wanted to put two of our party in one room and two in another but that isn’t supported or, if by some chance I missed how to do it, it is totally unobvious how to do it.
Here’s another weird decision TripHub made: The country field only has options for United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Australia, and Other. If you select Other a new field appears for you to enter your destination country. Now it is not hard to make a selection box that lists all of the possible countries in the world and having a field pop up unexpectedly is bad user interface design.
According to a TechCrunch blog entry reviewing TripHub, the service, founded by “a group of Expedia and Microsoft veterans, … has received funding from the Madrona Venture Group.”
TechCrunch was cautious in its overall assessment of TripHub but I’m going to be rather more harsh: TripHub has got a good idea but a lousy architecture that is not intuitive to use and is far too rigid for anything but something like conference planning.
In the end I gave up on trying to plan our trip on TripHub – it just didn’t seem to easy enough to add value to the process.
Another concern I have is that TripHub’s privacy policy is less than reassuring. Its assertion “TripHub does not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or companies” is pretty much invalidated by the rest of the sentence which continues with “except …” and that not to mention the clauses that follow.
This service underlines an important Web applications design principle: Web applications for general use must not be hard to understand. If I, as someone who looks at these services professionally, can’t figure out how to use it then the average user hasn’t got a chance.
The key to success is that the flow of logic through using the service must be smooth and obvious. What I wanted to be able to do was set up the flights, the hotel, assign people to rooms, and specify the places we will go and for the process to be a simple and effective use of my time. TripHub didn’t deliver.
TripHub has a good idea and maybe its next version will get it right. Or perhaps someone else will eat its lunch, which shouldn’t be hard. Any venture capitalists want to fund a little project …?
