Ask HN: Review my startup, gtrot.com
Looking particularly for feedback on ease of use, UX and UI inputs. We opened up the site to everyone yesterday and would love the HN view of how to make it better.
http://gtrot.com
http://gtrot.com
I happen to live outside hipster nation, so it took a while to load stuff. It did OK at letting me know this was in progress, but it could have been better. Had I not been reviewing it, I might have abandoned it.
Going to the second page of items took longer than it should have.
Returning to the site, it seems to want to start over acquiring the location. Can you not insert some memory for place in a first-party cookie?
The place-locator button won't turn green unless the place is spelled perfectly. It's case sensitive.
You might rethink the "generic" language shown to those who decline fb / tw access. Of course, if your monetizing scheme requires access to those services, maybe you're doing the right thing.
I live in a place with lots of summer visitors, but right now it isn't summer.
Data-wise, it seems to repeat items when there aren't enough items to fill its UI. Maybe it's only fair that there should be lots of dunkins and starbucks on line; there are in real life. But it's a little hokey looking.
The Google Maps placemark (red ice-cream-cone with rectangle in it) is recognizable. It looks like an affordance to get to a map. But it isn't. The scroll-in Click To Expand does exactly the same thing as clicking on the picture or the placemark, as far as I can tell. Also, the cursor doesn't change anywhere within a place listing. Lost opportunity for UX depth?
Thanks for the chance to review this. All the best.
The shade of blue isn't pleasing to my eyes, or maybe that there's just so much of it is what's hurting? I'm not a color or design specialist, so this is just my opinion and might just be preference.
Very neat site though, I could see myself using it.
– The search UX isn't very good. I sat there for 20-30 seconds after typing "detroit" in the box and clicking on the greyed-out button (not clear that's a deactivated state until you see green) before realizing that i had to make a selection from the drop down. I would add a notification with instructions upon clicking on the greyed out one at the least. Additionally, even after typing "Detroit, MI" in the box, an exact match, i had to click it in the dropdown. Don't like that at all.
– Facebook popup after searching was a bit in-your-face for me. Plain annoying for the second and third searches. Searching nearby cities can give new, useful results, so I'd love to see an additional search input on the results page. (http://cl.ly/0s0b420a0q3p1K2m1y0Q looks like a good spot)
– Infinite scroll would be great on the results page, as the app seems to be great for browsing through many thumbnails and discovering a few new things.
Nice job though! I found many things around me that I hadn't heard of before. Great start.
I imagine it's going to be hard to present information in the same way for large and small towns... Maybe you need some kind of a city/busy/crowded interface to give categories and narrow down, but for a little place without much of interest you just showed paged and ranked like this? Like, "entertainment in Chicago" or "food in Los Angeles" are way too broad a category to present in this format.
Do you think time of day would help or search instead of filter?
* I like the footprints in the logo a lot - it makes me realize quickly that this is an app for exploring nearby. The logo could be easier to read. White line on red outline is pretty hard on the iPad.
* The "Click here for travel dates" is too faded to read easily.
* When I type "San Francisco", the AJAX loader takes quite a while. This may just be server load - consider pre-sending some results for popular cities, or the most likely cities, or ideally do a geolocate on my IP.
* I like the page slide effect a lot.
* I don't understand some of the images, like the mardi gras mask on the "Contact" page, or the gray drops on the "Work with us" page. On all these pages, consider moving the logo from upper right to upper left where it's more typical thus easier to find.
* The explore page UX/UI is gorgeous. Very well done. The pics though seem to be quite vague, especially of the bars and restaurants many of which look like blurry snapshots of unknown backgrounds. See San Francisco "Baretta" or "Clift House" for examples.
Great site overall - will definitely use it.
The AJAX loader for cities preloading some results resonates strongly with me and will hopefully be implemented soon as we work on tightening the UX. Facebook(among plenty of others) does this for friend search and it makes a huge difference in the experience of using that search.
Personally, I would just go to the results page and encourage the user to connect to facebook in a less obtrusive way. Also when clicking on an event it would be nice if you could pull in some more information through some API be it the specific event information or details about the artist playing.
1. Making the blue background lighter or changing to a different scheme may be easier on the eyes and less agressive
2. Please use a custom theme for the jquery-ui widgets (like the autocomplete). It's like default and it doesn't match the page
3. I don't think blocking the search button is a good idea, if the autocomplete goes slow or the user is fast it will create the illusion of a broken button.
4. Give the search button a little bit of button style
5. I don't like the sign on facebook popup that gets on the way of the search, maybe putting it on the results page would be less anoying making users click on sign in only when they have tried and liked the application.
6. If you don't like 5), at least put the 'No thanks, show me generic results' on a button, something green or so, like the search button
7. Fix the 'Sorry! No items match this filter.' message, it's only text, you can do better using some cute images and inviting the user to re-search or change tabs.
That is about it, looks nice.
So I'm going to New Orleans in January. I typed in my dates and all and started clicking around. The design is beautiful and UX/UI was intuitive.
Some product feedback:
I'm overloaded. There is way too much to look through in New Orleans. I need a better way to filter and curate. This would be really useful if I had the time to sit down and go through all of it but I don't. I might be missing some obvious stuff (it's happened before), but I also don't know how things are being ranked. I literally want one page to go through and ignore the rest, hopefully feeling somewhat confident in knowing that the first page is the most relevant for me. Just my two cents!
-Alex
The fixed bottom footer could use a bit more contrast. When the white text from the main body slides over it, it gets garbled and messy looking. Also, there feels like too much space between each section when I scroll down.
I like that I can see results without having to sign in with Facebook. It lets me try out the service before I commit.
The color scheme is cheerful, but a bit too harsh. The nav elements within the results also lack contrast.
The animation on the place name on hover is neat the first time, but annoying every time after. The tiles are just jumping around all over when I move my mouse.
Filtering by category could be faster, but I like that it does it via ajax and stays on the same page.
Overall, good job! Best of luck
Also, jQuery UI's Autocomplete by default looks really bad. While yeah, usability comes before shinyness, it's something worth fixing when there's time.
http://moustach.io/welcome/e/reviewed/Y5mKqqZ7Iy36Ldr33TuHX5...
My review is targeted at the content prior to a query. Your landing page.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Not sure why it is all javascript. The functionality is nothing special. The things you do with Javascript are annoying to me (popup windows that are no browser/OS-controlled windows).
Apart from that it seems nice. Seemingly good results for my non-USA hometown which is rare.
Alternative browsing method might be using Next/ Previous buttons inside lightbox, or left right arrows on keyboard
Not a major issue, but it could get weird.
Nice job on the new UI, btw. It's been awhile since I've logged in.
The initial search box is flawed. I typed in "New York City" and it got stuck on that. You should be more flexible with user inputs, or at least fix the autocomplete so it still suggests "New York, NY" after I've typed in "New York City"..
I notice that the suggestions for Miami are kind of weak in terms of interest value and the photos associated with them don't make sense (i.e., a guy in a nightclub for Dadeland Mall). Where are you getting the data from?
Thanks for the feedback!
I finally found a free minute and got it all setup so it should be live this week
Thanks for the feedback!
Liking the site!
How long did it take you from conception to launching the site?
also the results show events that were only temporary and are already over .i only checked Hamburg, Germany and the first 2 results are temporary events that are over.
I'm heading down to Buenos Aires for a couple of months in January, so I'll test it out down there as well.
I think once it catches on with my friends (I tried back in July, but I'll keep at it) it's got a lot of potential. I think people naturally like sharing new places and experiences with people. If I post a status message on Facebook that I'm going to Random City, someone will tell me to eat at a certain place or make sure I see a certain thing.
It looks like there's enough recommendations that it's not as reliant on the network effects that made it less appealing in the beginning. Are those all user recs or did you have to scrape data from someplace else?
I would use this much more if 1. it were mobile and 2. it really emphasized the events.
Results will update based on friend check-ins. Can take a minute or two to load. You can also add your Foursquare profile if you have one to help influence results.