Gogobot, the social travel site that recently passed the 1 million registered user mark, just launched an interesting redesign this week that turn the site’s homepage into more of an interactive magazine experience with a focus on photos instead of the site’s previous text-heavy design. As Gogobot’s founder Travis Katz told me earlier this week, the Gogobot team noticed that its users didn’t just use the service to plan their trips and update their friends, but that many of them also used the service just to browse photos. This, said Katz, became especially clear after Gogobot launched its mobile app earlier this year and allowed users to share and create virtual postcards from their trips.
Ever since it launched, Gogobot hand-curated images from Flickr and other sources. Now that its users are also contributing thousands of images, Katz said, putting more emphasis on these photos was an obvious choice for the company. Katz stressed that while the new design looks a bit Pinterest-like, Gogobot always focused on the visual aspects of its service. Now, however, the highly visual and more magazine-style browsing experience is at the service’s center.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that two of Gogobot’s smaller competitors Trippy and Gtrot look quite a bit like Pinterest, but in our conversation, Katz stressed that while these services may provide travelers with inspiration for their trips, only Gogobot offers users a more complete solution.
That said, though, while the company also made some minor updates to the look and feel of the rest of the site, this redesign doesn’t affect Gogobot’s feature set. What the new design does, though, said Katz, is make it easier for the service’s users to find travel ideas and do some aspirational browsing on the site. The main focus of Gogobot, of course, also remains on the social aspects of the service, which lets you see which hotels and sights your friends liked when they traveled to a certain city, for example.
Given the success of its mobile app, Katz also said, Gogobot plans to launch a number of new mobile features in the near future as well, though he wasn’t quite ready to share any details yet.
