As much as I love exploring cities, I love the tools which help me to uncover a city: Maps! Luckily we are not the only ones and are excited to see different people producing different maps of beautiful London. We would like to share our favourites with you and kick off with an extract from the Geotaggers ‘ World Atlas by Eric Fisher. Eric produced the pictures by using Flickr locational APIs for over 70,000 pictures and overlayed it on an OpenStreetMap. Enjoy! It’s a beautiful view of London.

You can clearly see that Greenwich in the South East and Kew Gardens in the far West of London are popular places to take pictures. I also think that there are a lot of pictures taken up in Wembley in the North West. Not sure what the cluster that is just north of Canary Wharf is.

Our friends at Flowing Data inform us that trace colours indicate mode of transportation: Black is walking, red is bicycling, and blue is moving by motor vehicle.

Side note: If you have any other beautiful maps geotagged or otherwise we are always keen to look at them!

Our design crew has been busy creating a beautiful draft of the plan page. This is the meaty part of whataplan that will present each of your wonderful plans. Important components are:

• a freely editable plan description
• plan details showing address and displaying it on a map
• the ability to like, dislike and share the plan
• uploading pictures
• ability to comment on plans
• suggestions of nearby plans and other plans that you might like

You will see on the right hand side that you can see which of our fellow planologists (users) also liked the plan opening up the floor for some interaction with like minded users. Yes please!

The way we think WhataPlan is going to be working is that users are going to be looking for a particular activity to do in London. You are the user. You will be choosing a category to make a plan. The question is, what are the right categories to choose from? We are currently thinking that these cover most potential activities:

• Drinking (Pubs & Bars)
• Eating (Restaurants)
• Family Fun (things to do with the kids)
• Listening (Concerts, Reading events)
• Outdoors  (Parks, walks)
• Partying (Clubs, Bars)
• Playing (Games, activities)
• Watching (Theatre, Cinema)
• Extraordinary (unusual things)
• Dating (where to go on a date)
• Cultural (Museums, Concerts)

We will also have a ‘Surprise me’ option in case you’re finding it difficult to know what you are looking for. Do you think we have covered all your bases?

Welcome to the second weekly update from your Whataplan headquarters

Yesterday’s post was nicely important: We presented our vision for WhataPlan! It was a long post and it’s probably easier to share our vision if you see it in front of you. So today…ah, wait there is a mild knock on the door, I better go an answer….guess who that was? It was an interested blog reader who told me to stop talking and just publish the new design of the WhataPlan landing page.  Immediately. No waiting around. So here it is! A big thanks to the guys at SAM IT for the hard work and Michael at The House for comments and guidance:

Landing page design

Click to enlarge the screenshot here:

The interested reader just called: He now wants a bit more background on what we think the user journey is going to be. I told him that I’m not 100% sure what a user journey is but I’m happy to have a go at sharing a few words on what our thinking is. He said that’s pukka. I don’t know what he meant, but this is what I told him:

Components
We think that the most important element of the homepage is the plan creator (the white box with the red stitching). This is where the user’s attention is drawn to. This is where the user chooses the category, the are of London and maybe a time of day for his/her plan which will be generated by hitting the “Make this plan” button.  We are also trying to go for a clean uncluttered design so the content preview columns (popular, recent and featured plans) have been degraded to the bottom of the page so to avoid confusing the user why she visited Whataplan.com: To discover awesome plans!

Generally, our principles in designing continue to be a sketchy and friendly look. We also like yellow.

What do you like about the design? Is it too yellow? What can we do better?

Please have a pleasant weekend!

Best,
Matthias

Whilst we are working away, getting excited about new designs and sweet features that our website should have, it is easy for us to lose sight of the big picture. What are we actually trying to achieve? Why is this project worth losing sleep over? Well, the reason is: We have a vision. And we want to share this vision with you today. Right here. Let’s start right now.

We love London and the feeling that some amazing stuff happens just around the corner never really leaves us. Only sometimes it’s difficult to find out about that cafe that serves coffee like it should be or the small museum that you wish you had known about earlier. Yes, you’re right: there are some well established and quality channels for Londoners to find out about our city but it usually requires you to have some idea of what you are looking for: If you know you want to go to the theatre you turn to Time Out. If you know you want to go to the pub, fancyapint is your friend and if you want to go for a quality meal, one of the many local review sites is trying to make your choice of restaurant easier. What happens if the sun is shining, it might be a Saturday and you have some time on your hands, have itchy feet and all you need is a plan? You turn to What a plan!

The website we have in mind is very simple: you give us some idea of what you might be interested in (i.e. family fun, cultural, clubbing), you can choose in what part of London your plan should be located and decide on a time of day. You hit a button and Whataplan serves up a plan for you! You might like it. Or you hit the button again and make another plan. That way you stumble across London and discover the city one plan at a time.

We also have some extensions of this in mind, but we are still going through some pains to decide what is realistic to do now and what to do later. Watch this space for updates and let us know what you think. And don’t forget: Rome wasn’t build in a day!

This is the end of a long week. What happened over at Whataplan HQ?

As previously blogged we’ve taken down whataplan.com and replaced it with a landing page (thanks again to Michael at The House, ) where you can still sign up for beta testing and some additional insight scoop!

On the development front, we had a first look at the website prototype and played around with some of its functionalities. It works! But we still need to add a good chunk of the components that we have in mind for you and we need to dress it up nicely. Speaking of graphics, we have a new logo. Your feedback is still welcome! We also had some discussions about how the potential landing page might look like (yellow will feature!) and have seen an excellent first draft of one of the main pages of the site. Generally, we are excited by the fact that everything is coming together and we hope to have the courage to share our work with you shortly.

Elsewhere, we have put our social media foot forward, revived the facebook group and entered the world of twitter. We hope to be able to use these channels to talk about the content that we are putting together and are relying on your help to add your own personal London favourites to the mix. Tweet as if there is no tomorrow and when you use the hashtag #whataplan we will be able to pick up your suggestions of nice places in London.

We already have 350 super plans, ranging from “Go and sit on a bench on Parliament Hill” to “Visit the London Metal Exchange open outcry trading floor”! We are now going through the exciting task of populating the content with locational details which is going to keep us busy for some time (if anyone wants to help?).

Please have a good weekend,

Alan and Matthias

We are pleased to present our new logo! We were looking for a handcrafted design with a sketchy feel to it. What do you think? All thoughts are greatly appreciated!

Today we said goodbye to the old whataplan.com! After two years of being out there in the big wild world, it was time for it to get a well deserved break. You will be pleased to know that the website is in good care with us and we have already started with some reengineering, rejigging and redesigning. We are hoping to be able to share some new features with you shortly!

You will see that whataplan.com presents you with a temporary holding page. You can sign up there to become one of our first beta testers when the site is ready to go live again.

Finally a big thanks must go to Michael Murdoch at The House for a super quick turnaround on the holding page and some beautiful handcrafted graphics.

Just a quick note that we are now on twitter! Talk to us on @whataplancom; use the #whataplan hashtag to share your favourite things about London or to give us feedback on the development process (we will need it!). We are looking forward to the conversation!