Jan 7, 2013 0
My employer, Vantage Travel, is hiring an email program manager. It’s a mixed metrics/analytics and vendor management role. We’re about to embark upon an enterprise-class ESP integration, so the successful candidate gets to participate in that process from day 1. Full time, permanent, at Vantage’s home office in Boston. Ping me @jackexmachina if interested.
Mar 8, 2012 1
This morning I was researching Pinterest, the wildly popular social media app that lets users set up pinboards of products & other things they find interesting. In doing so, I noticed something that a web designer would be wise to take into account: Pinterest users rarely re-post images with captions in them.
Sure, there are some. But by and large, Pinterest users are there for the pretty pictures. The app itself captions images and links back to the sites from which they were pinned, but you’ll see very little copy in the pictures themselves.
If Pinterest is an important social media channel for your company, having great quality photography isn’t enough. It should be re-pinnable.
Luckily, my employer’s site passes the Pinterest test. Check it out (click on the photo to zoom):
Pinning from my employer's web site
Because our captions are rendered using HTML & CSS, the big, pretty pictures that a Pinterest user would want do share (the first five from top left) have no ugly text on them. They’d look fine on someone’s pin board.
It would be nice if we had some tall, vertical images. Tall verticals and squares look great on a pin board. But the lack of copy is a great start.
Now compare to one of my employer’s competitors (again, you’ll want to zoom):
Pinning from one of my employer's competitors
It’s a mixed bag. There are some nice smaller photos that a Pinterest user could grab, but the big, beautiful ones (like the castle shot at top left) contain captions. Pinterest users don’t want these on their pinboards. Designers like layering captions onto photos in Photoshop, because it’s easy to do text effects and get a clean font render. But they might be hurting their chances of being re-shared on social media in the process.
Note I said “social media,” not just, “Pinterest.” I think what Pinterest brings into relief that we haven’t noticed before is a more general fact about users’ habits in re-sharing the content we create. Users would rather share a photo without a big caption on it (unless it’s something like a cartoon or a meme). If we can rely on the user to caption the photo for us, and to link back to our site (as we can with Pinterest), it’s better to use CSS and HTML to caption photos. They’re more likely to get re-shared as a result.
What could make either of these sites even friendlier to Pinterest would be some tall, thin images. I think I’ll have to experiment with hiding tall images on a page specifically for Pinterest to find. I’ll be sure to post the results.
Feb 29, 2012 0
Groupize, a booking engine for large hotel room blocks
Groupize is a new travel industry tool. It’s a hotel booking engine. So what, right? Its cool trick is booking blocks of up to 25 rooms at a time, which no other hotel booking engine does at present. Awesome if you’re a wedding planner… and the UX is nice.
Facebook is making another design change. This time it’s to Facebook Pages, which are bread & butter for the social marketing community. This post on spottedsun.com has the skinny.
Microsoft, partnering with the government of the Balearic Islands, has established an innovation center specifically for tourism (site is in Spanish). The Balearics are an out of the way place to do this, but it’ll be interesting to see if this yields any fruit for the travel industry.
O’Reilly Radar post on the state of APIs and the directions in which they’re currently developing. As a web app guy, I found the bit about using APIs to drive analytics particularly interesting.
And one more Facebook-related article… This piece from Fast Company describes (puportedly) leaked internal Facebook documents that describe their future vision for online ads. Briefly, it looks like they want to drop display advertising completely in favor of social ads that show up as conversations. Will users go for that? A few years ago I would have said “no,” but they might be on to something with the approach outlined here.
Feb 23, 2012 0
Vantage Deluxe World Travel, my employer, has a number of reqs open for tech jobs right now. These are all in either the IT or Interactive Marketing Depts., and are full-time, on-site, in downtown Boston, Massachusetts.
Update (2/23): We’ve just added a req for a senior print graphic designer, too!
Feel free to reply by comment with questions. You can apply here.
We do not work with recruiters.
PHOTO FROM WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
Dec 17, 2010 0
If I were in the business of language learning for travelers, I’d be cashing out right about now.
Word Lens uses image recognition to do on the fly translations from English to Spanish. Image recognition and translation are nothing new, but the app distinguishes itself with its AR interface. Word Lens layers the translated text over the source text, re-writing things like signs so that on the device, they appear in the user’s language.
Right now it does English-Spanish, but adding more languages shouldn’t be too hard compared to the technical hurdles these developers have leapt already. This is the type of AR app I love to see.
One problem: it requires an internet connection. For those of us who pay through the nose for roaming out of country, it’d be much better if this type of app had a language database that lived on the phone.
It’s $4.99 for the iPhone. No word on a Droid version.
