When planning long train trips across Europe (e.g. Brussels -> Sicily), standard routing criteria such as travel time and number of transfers become less relevant. I want a comfortable connection, with enough buffers, in particular when operators change. If I need to stop somewhere overnight on long trips, let’s make it a place I haven’t visited yet! But please, let’s arrive there early enough so that I have time for some touristing. Aha, there is a (non-optimal) route through Munich? That’s a chance to visit an old friend I haven’t seen in a while! Oh, I see, I have to change trains in Rome anyway? Lunch out in the sun on the piazza, that sounds fantastic. In short, for such trips, the journey can often feel as part of the destination.

The criteria listed above are quite personal and often only emerge while planning the trip. Sure, existing routing tools allow me to change my search settings and re-run the search. But what I really want is to interact with the proposed travel plans, to change them how I see fit. Move connections here and there, use drag&drop to try out what would happen if I did take time for that lunch in Rome, how much later would I arrive at my destination? To explore on a map what possible routes there even are, and perhaps add a little detour to a place I’ve been wanting to visit.

In my project Trans-Europe-Planner (funded by prototypefund/German Ministry of Education and Research), I am building such a user interface, testing out different UX mechanisms for interactively exploring, moving connections around, trying things out, comparing options. How that all works and how users respond to it, that is what I want to discuss in my talk.