The screenshots below show how the homepage design of travel inspiration site Joobili changed from private beta to its current incarnation.
They're courtesy of co-founder Jared Salter, who sent them to me after I posted about Joobili's date slider on Travel Weekly Blog...
Stage one
Stage two: The calendar becomes more prominent...
Stage three: Graphics for date-based and location-based searches
Stage four (current version): Location graphic removed, date-based search (which is Joobili's differentiation point) comes to the fore
Thoughts?
Jared and co have done a great job with Joobili.
But some questions:
* How reliant (and therefore limiting) is Joobili on Ajax?
* What is the timescale for the design evolution above?
* How did the Joobili team wrestle with the need for adspace (revenue!) against the desire for the excellent user experience?
@Nathan- glad you found the design progression interesting. We believe our early designs fell into the same trap as most other travel sites...trying to offer everything to everyone. Maybe we went too far by focusing solely on Time as the entry point, but we really believe you can innovate by simplifying just as much as you can innovate by adding. Time will tell if we were right:)
@Kevin- good questions.
* Ajax offers a slick user experience, but does have some limitations, specifically SEO is an area we are creating some work arounds. The real limitation would come with mobile apps. I've heard good arguments from both sides of the debate.
* Design evolution was 6 months. The first three designs were private beta, and the final design is what we launched with in February. From the early designs nobody really understood how Joobili was different. We tried to fix this.
* I think you'll be able to judge this question yourself in our next relaunch in a couple months. We'll be introducing banner space and other promotion opportunities. Definitely a challenge to maintain our user experience while offering these revenue streams, but we think we've found the right balance. Happy to give you a sneak peak before it goes live.
The third stage looks quite interesting to me. But I think with web development, you have to choose between user habits and creativity. They don't always go along.
http://www.OurExplorer.com
Travel through the eyes of a local
Is there a specific reason I only see "loading Joobili" in Safari 3 on a Mac?