Dear Yelp, What am I supposed to click on? | Hacker News Reader

Dear Yelp, What am I supposed to click on?

melmiranda.com

28 pointsdikbrouwer20 comments

So, right now, this article is the talk of the Yelp engineering team. The consensus is that we need people to work on exactly this sort of thing.

If you think you can improve the design of this page (or any of the others), we're looking for designers and PMs. Send me your resume. My login (at) yelp.com.

Really?? It took a simple blog post for someone to go "hmmmm" about over there? Not to sound like a complete ass, but, just like with eBay, I vastly prefer using your iPhone app to using the web interface due to its (relative) simplicity, and even that I only do because I can't write a review directly from the iPhone app and must finalize it on a real computer.

Speaking of that, why on earth can I only write drafts on mobile devices and not submit reviews? I'm just as likely to write a drunk or extremely pissed review regardless of the device I'm typing on. If anything, waiting until I get to a computer makes me instil the reviews with more sarcasm than I would in the spur of the moment on a mobile device.

"Really?? It took a simple blog post for someone to go "hmmmm" about over there?"

Of course not. Yelp, like any other large and growing website, is constrained by dev resources. We have to prioritize features, and the more great designers and PMs who work here, the more resources we have to make every page look great.

But as far as hiring goes, it's always a great sign when someone is so passionate about your site that they're writing blog posts about how to improve it.

Ask the nice lady who posted it on her blog?

"nice lady" has been notified. Will email you, nice bloke from Yelp.

They're not mutually exclusive. ;-)

It does need fixing but you guys don't need to go all overboard hiring people and stuff to get it. It's just what the article said. There was a ~perfect~ analysis some graphic designer/something did of newtwitter where they fixed everything with these slight tweaks to font / headers being more easily picked out of sections and everything else. It was just perfect for this, but fucked if I can find it now. Literally just read it from something here or on reddit yesterday but no search is turning it up. You guys could do this yourselves given a good day or so of tweaking shit.

Really tried hard to find that link, it's there somewhere if someone can search better than me. Tell Gabe jesse said so. =)

Don't you guys have any in-house programmers, or did you fire everybody once you launched your business?

I only ask because this seems quite common these days.

Nope. Yelp is engineering-driven (the CEO sits 15 feet from my desk), and the the team is great. We're hiring like crazy.

If you're reading this, and you're a developer looking for a gig in San Francisco, send me your resume.

i wasn't going to read this because of the stupid "= fail" title, but then i realized it wasn't the original title of the post. why did the submitter change it?

> I’m sure whatever product manger they have wants me to do something more than anything else. Maybe that’s completing my profile, accepting friend requests, seeing sales and offers (hello revenue) or simply searching for a restaurant.

Actually, it really does look like Yelp wants her to complete her profile -- and search for something in San Francisco. Everything else is kind of a wash, as pointed out, because the page is too damned busy.

Hehe I was working on a competitor as a sponsored bespoke developer. Unfortunately, the project sponsor insisted on a similarly cluttered design, and then an even more hotch potch of a feature set.

What would you want to do I guess is the answer? See special offers? See reviews? See what your mate's have reviewed?

From my perspective, when I go on Yelp I'd like to see latest/relevant reviews, and search. The other stuff isn't really that important to me.

Every time I try to use yelp.com I am reminded about how much more focused and useful their iphone app is in comparison. The results are always more meaningful and organized in a way that makes it easier to consume.

One thing that'd be nice would be if Yelp could geolocate the IP address I was coming from (NYC) and autofill in the "Near" textbox with "New York, NY" instead of having me go to /nyc.

cluttered designs == longer time on site, more clicks, more page views.

I think this is an overly cynical view. I don't think anyone actually strives for mediocrity. Maybe someone might rationalize it after the fact -- "I did that on purpose to increase page views." The fat cat PM smoking a cigar and pulling at his suspenders, yelling in a fast-talking Transatlantic accent for "More clutter on the page, or it's your ass!" strikes me as cartoonish ;)

(I don't think Yelp's design is mediocre; it attracted me to the site over CitySearch years ago. I think it's just a little dated, and hasn't integrated what we've all learned about UX in the interim yet.)

Really? I'd love to see the stats for this. More time on site may just be a reflection of more time on that page, because people spend so much time figuring it out (in which case you'd want to look at the bounce rate, I bet it's high). And more page views, why do people still care so much about pageviews when primary monetization is not via CPM ads?

Regardless, I'd love to see a source for this claim.

If you contrast yelp to craigslist homepage, the clutter on yelp jumps out even more dramatically

I tend to use Yelp only in the capacity that I run into it in Google results.

I imagine quite a bit of their traffic does the same thing if the "1% contribute" axiom is true.

If that's the case, the "shouldn't change in case we break SEO" is probably spot on, even though rearranging CSS shouldn't break the Google blackbox, if it did it would be catastrophic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com