Summary

We have decided to take impulsifly offline.

Recap:
- took about 3 months to ramp traffic up to 200 visitors / month
- return flight was not immediately intuitive for everyone
- received surprisingly good anecdotal responses, surprised to find that a number of visitors clicked through to book flights
- never formally contacted the airlines to organize data feed & commission.
- was approached by an ad agency looking to broaden their asia pacific website base.
- reached peak of several thousand visitors during Pope visit.
- not long after, Virgin blocked our data scraper.

Gained:
- Technologies - GWT, SpringMVC, HSQLDB
- SEO - delayed gratification. 30 minutes/day goes a very long way.
- Design - listen to users, but more importantly, OBSERVE. Analytics is invaluable. Involve user testing ASAP (friends) - start feedback loop early.
- Misc - register domain, host, maintain (impulsifly is arguably not a good name because it is prone to mistakes, but it was the best we could come up with)

There are avenues which we hadn't fully explored, but other opportunities have emerged so we have decided to cut impulsifly in pursuit of these other options.
I'll post more information here as we progress, but the profit of the current project we are working on is inversely proportional to its popularity.

A snap shot of impulsifly's main screen:

Are we back?

Hey our scrapers are working again!

Edit: 9/9/08
It's blocked again. Doh.

Uh Oh

One of the carriers seem to have our data gatherer blocked.

This is going to be tough, lets see if we could convince them otherwise. in the mean time, we wouldnt be able to provide you with the proper fare comparison we had promised, so please use one of the other flight aggregators instead.

I know our service is so much faster and easier to use than the other guys (heh), but I would much rather you use them instead of getting an incomplete comparison from us until we get this sorted.

Judging by appearance

Google analytics show a number of visitors gets 'bounced' at the homepage. Bounce here means they did not proceed to use the service (either by closing the browser or navigating to another site - like hitting the back button).

I don't have anything more to work with, but I think it has something to do with our layout. I'm guessing the homepage isn't generating enough excitement for the visitors to click through.

However I honestly believe this spartan layout is really nice (and have received some good feedback precisely because it's so minimalist)... so rather than not generating excitement, I am pointing my finger at trust. I think when visitors are at a new website, it is as (if not more) important that they feel they can expect what will happen. With our homepage, the referred visitors like it because they know us and (i think) trusts us. But there is nothing there to make a completely new visitor feel safe.

So I have added a screen shot to the front page, I think it demonstrates some functionalities and gives the visitor some reassurance of what can be expected. (Well that was a lot of deliberation to add a simple pic!)

Logo?

I think it's about time we get a logo. Got any ideas?

Missing Ballina Virgin

Someone pointed out that flights between Ballina Byron & Sydney for Virgin is missing. Thanks!! It has been added and data should start appearing in a day or two. I hope you find what you are after :)

Be Practical

One particular compliment we've been receiving particularly consistently is how practical the application is. And I just want to say how pleased we are that you notice :) quite a bit of effort have gone in to do away with redundant texts, redundant images and well, redundant clicks.

Having said that though, one particular criticism we've been receiving also very consistently is the layout. It's so bland compared to the other travel sites!

This is a hard one to resolve... my natural defense is point to how google products are so much more intuitive to use than their competitors. BUT, working well doesn't mean you can't look cool, check out Apple products! So the conclusion is, I really don't have an excuse and I will blend functionality with style as soon as I am capable :)

International Flights are LIVE!!!

some tasty destinations are Nagoya, Honolulu and Vanuatu!

More to come! Woot!

Internation Flights #2

It's getting there!

I've played around with the prototype for a bit, and man, looking at oversea destinations is much more exciting than looking at local destinations. Even though Sydney to Perth is a longer travel than to many places, the fact that it's overseas just give me such a buzz.

I havent added any new carriers yet (such as VAustralia). Oh the possibilities.

International Flights

International Flights are coming soon... (!!!!)

Flog

Played with Facebook for a bit, and drafted up a page for impulsifly. Seems like a really good way to share information and build community - but it also looks like alooooooooooot of work. I wonder if we'll see jobs for Facebook admin soon... PR, must have facebook experience heehee.

Meaningful Data

Updated the table to highlight weekends instead of every second column. (Thanks Mr TC!) This makes so much more sense because the data is so much more meaningful.

Reminds me of a post from Seth Godin about generic sorts (alphabetical order, date order) being obsolete. I agree with it mostly and I want to adjust our destination in order of popularity + cost somehow.

News != Blog

I have removed the 'Whats New' section.

The first reason is because it just took too long to load. (Bad Feedburner!) I'd originally intended for this blog to be the news section. New entries are then converted into page content via a conversion service provided Feedburner. However, Feedburner simply took too long to load! And there is no good reason why we should delay the user from getting to what they are here for because of some measley 'News'.

The second reason is that, I can't guarantee all posts to be relevant. And I have found there are items worth noting, yet don't deserve to be on the main page. So I my conclusion is 'News' != 'Blog'. Visitors who are interested in the development of Impulsifly can click on the Blog link instead.

For the mean time, I have replaced the left hand side column with Google Ads.

PS: Thanks, FAQ is now spelled in caps :)

What's New?

Added the "What's new?" section to the site. We've been making quite a bit of changes, so this section just serves as a notice board. In addition to publishing system notices and updates, we'll also use this space to publish upcoming special events - when we do have special events.

Oh and the current layout is only an initial effort, it'll get revisited later.

Text updates and Return Flight Prompt revisited

Updated various texts around the site to be more descriptive.
In particular the older Home Page did not give a complete summary of Impulsifly. We know most visitors wouldn't even notice there were words on the home page :) But we would like to give good information to those who happen to cast a glance (it's our 2 second pitch).

Another area that got a major revamp is the faq section. We have added alot of good information (and a huge thankyou for asking lots of good questions!)

Finally, we revisited the prompt that informs users how to bring up return flights. The old text prompt was too dissociated from the data table, so we have brought it down to fill up the space in the corner of the table.

Google Analytics

Added - unfortunately I cant share the report site (have to add users one by one). But I'll post graphs here from time to time.

We are open!

At... http://impulsifly.com.au

I am smiling as I type this, it's a wonderful feeling. Ofcourse now the real work begins. We have just taken the first step to a long and hopefully fulfilling road, it has certainly been great fun so far!

Rapid Deployment

Firstly, some minor update to UI:
- autoscroll to make the expanded return flights row visible if it is hidden.
- fixed a small calculation bug that sometimes thinks the top row shouldn't be visible.

And I have also cleaned up application resource management, to make redeployment easier. There is still a lot that can be improved, but I think we have made a step in the right direction - because improvements to the application are only realized when they are being used.

Toyota makes about a million improvements/innovations a year. Yahoo updates their infrastructure three times a day. So we are going to try to make our processes thrive on change as well :)

Click Clack Front n Back

Added more cues to suggest clicking on the destinations will yield return flights.

This has been a bit of a recurring theme where users did not discover the return flight function. Hopefully the new visual cues will address it.

On the backend, we have reconfigured the service to send compressed data across the wire. This reduces the transfer size by a factor of 10, so it would improve response time (shorten that initial loading message) and preserve precious traffic quota. Each page visit now amounts to about 100kb for a new user, and less than 30kb for a returning user.

Deployment #2

Completed porting Impulsifly into a distributed architecture.

The data gathering side sits on a server with unlimited bandwidth (hostjava.net, these guys are economical - but have bad support and performance).

Whilst the client facing end stays with Metawerx which offers excellent support and performance, but is on the stingy end with traffic quota.

This way, we can run intensive data gathers without compromise on performance - it does
increase our hosting cost by about $9.00 a month though... buuuuut hey i spend that much on cr@ppy food court lunches anyway.