Assignment 2 Application Critique: Google Trips

Only a mobile app

Google trips is a good mobile app with a pretty UI and good UX. Its true that mobile app is obviously more accessible during travel but it would be really great to have a web version too for planning stages, since planning is easier on a browser and you can do your research and planning on one platform, and do not have to go back and forth to the mobile app to feed your data.

Fetching reservation details from gmail is buggy

This feature sounded intriguing to me but it was unfortunate to learn that it does not function well. Lots of users have complained about the app not detecting correct reservation details and also continuous importing of backdated/changed reservations that have already been cleared from trash. This feature should be improved as it is a key feature and you definitely do not want users to miss reservation confirmation notifications.

Timeline Functionality

In its presentation, Group 7 emphasized on the timeline functionality that they would want Google Trips to include. With this timeline feature, your trips can become more descriptive and a better log can be maintained. I agree with them. However I feel it can become a feature bloat if a simple travel planner has all features.

Moreover, a very important feature  I personally feel a trip planner should have is cost splitting. So maybe Google Trips can collaborate with Splitwise or make their own bill-splitting feature. 

Comments

  1. Unknown9 September 2017 at 23:28

    Hi Kush, Charlton here. Personally, I think that having the timeline feature should be the main focus for google trips. The main selling point about Google Trips is what Google does best - information searching and gathering. To further improve on their recommendation system, perhaps they should allow users to export their own trip itinerary as a package for other users to drag and drop into their own schedule. The itinerary would become better over time as more users try it out and offer improvements to the current package.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown10 September 2017 at 02:21

    Hey Kush! Google was smart to capitalise on travelers by creating 'Google Trips'. As someone who has used 'Google Trips' before, I was impressed by the curated information Google provided me with based on my flight/hotel bookings and interests (the question of using my private data is a separate debate). Yes, so far the app isn't able to detect every Gmail reservations but I think it will be resolved in the near future when Google AI improves even more. I think it is important to highlight that as of now, I can't think of any competitors to Google Trips. No other application out there is able to curate travel information as well as 'Google Trips'.

    I don't think that a 'Timeline' feature will pose as a feature bloat if implemented correctly. As much as possible, new features should be seamlessly integrated and complement existing ones.

    -- Jin Jia

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown10 September 2017 at 06:48

    Hi Jaron, thank you for commenting. I agree with you on the fact that its a very impressive app. As far as the auto-detection of reservations is considered, AI always gets better with time since more and more data gets added to the dataset which makes it smarter.

    -Kush

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 1 done

Things escalate really quickly in this module. Before we had reached even 30% of the first assignment, the second assignment was given yesterday. Honestly, its scary but I'm having a lot of fun learning new stuff. I am working on the backend for the first assignment. I've never done backend coding. I learnt node.js and express in 3 days and my groupmates are really considerate and helpful. Ana helped me understand relational database since I've not done Database Systems or CS2103 yet. Hopefully, I survive the following weeks and our project becomes a success. 
Read more

What I hope to learn in CS3216?

Taking CS3216 in year 2, I'm actually really scared as of now. Nevertheless, I aim to become a skilled web developer by the end of the course. Moreover, I will definitely become quicker and more efficient in learning new technologies since the schedule is so packed and there is so much to learn. I want to become an enterpreneur some day and learning skills other than coding, like marketing, pitching is essential. Teamwork and working with new individuals from different faculties with also be an important part of the experience.
Read more