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Would love any feedback you might have on http://parkgrades.com/ http://parkgrades.com/ (particularly the home page)...

by kongqiu 15y ago

abbasmehdi 15y ago
Great!
- kongqiu 15y ago
  Thank you.
mikegreenberg 15y ago
Sorry about the slow reply. ParkGrades is a GREAT idea. There's similar things put up by the city, but they typically pale in comparison. This also does a pretty decent job of find all of our local parks near us (which many sites like this have failed miserably at). Excellent call to action. "Search for Parks" is the #1 thing to do at your site and you put that basically front-and-center all over the place. Many developers tend to miss this. Good job! A few things that I thought were curious: - After searching, I see "Museum Amenities" and then filter-like links which will reduce the result set to locations with certain characteristics. The title/purpose of this block here creates some end-user conflict on how to interact with it. You might consider changing the name to reflect it's purpose rather than it's description. (like "Filter by Amenity") - On the park search page, consider a different way to your "Advanced Search" description underneath. I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me to do, so you might want to have some sort of text fields with greyed-out, pre-populated examples. Try to use common conventions anywhere possible. Look at advanced search forms and try to get good ideas on how to lay them out. - The links to connect to Facebook, Twitter, RSS on the main page is offset from the elements themselves. In other words, the area to actually click a link is about 10px left of where they would line up with the image they represent. This was giving me unusual visual feedback on what was clickable and made me "miss" the click when I tried to click through. You're probably losing some valuable click-throughs here. - It looks like you're using Drupal for this site. I've noticed lots of areas where the design could be "tightened up". If you're still testing the market, that's one thing, but consider paying attention to this in the near future before any large-scale launches. Additionally, I think Drupal is a VERY extensible and fantastic CMS, but it's a BITCH to configure and manage. Keep this in mind going forward as you don't want to be too invested in a product that will ultimately hold back your site's long-term ambitions. Once you've validated the market, you should be thinking about how your technical choices will affect your product in the medium-long-term (1-3 years). Many people will say It's hard to plan this far ahead (especially with technology's current pace) but if you know that your site will really require the flexibility of Drupal versus a simpler CMS, you'd be better off knowing that sooner than later. - Open up your comments! There's no reason you can't use something like Disqus for handling it. You get better engagement and is one less hurdle for eventually acquiring users. (I've seen an implementation somewhere which onboards a Disqus account into a native user registration after a certain amount of repeat engagement with a user.) These are just a few suggestions off the top of my head. I can go into detail about any of these if I was ambiguous.
- kongqiu 15y ago
  Thank you -- much appreciated! I'll definitely work on: Improving the usability of the Amenity filters Re-writing/replacing the "Advanced Search" function and/or instructions. I agree, it's way too much work to figure out right now. Correcting links, exploring Disqus for comments Drupal is a pain but since I had zero programming experience, it's relatively easy to learn. I'm currently learning Rails and believe it or not, Drupal was a decent introduction to the programming world (for a total novice) Thanks again, Mike, really cool to help like this!
pkamb 15y ago
Some quick usability comments after 5 minutes on the site: The first thing you see on the homepage should be a map and list of parks in your area. Don't require a search, triangulate the location via IP or something. Use a map to show what's nearby. Also have a (ranked by grade) list to show what nearby parks are the best. I think the park recognition needs some work! http://i.imgur.com/XVFKF.png http://i.imgur.com/XVFKF.png Searching for "Seattle" or "New York City" don't return any results, I can only get it to work with zip codes. You often have to tap the "Enter" key twice to get it to actually search. Annoying, I kept thinking it didn't have any results for a term but it in fact never searched at all. I don't know what the little spinning circle thing in the search bar does. Just seems to get in the way of me pressing "Enter". When I type "98101" it shows "98101 (Seattle, WA)" in the autocomplete box. But clicking that doesn't add the extra info to the search box. It the autocomplete actually helping clarify the query?

Would love any feedback you might have on http://parkgrades.com/ http://parkgrades.com/ (particularly the home page)...

by kongqiu 15y ago

Would love any feedback you might have on http://parkgrades.com/ http://parkgrades.com/ (particularly the home page)...

abbasmehdi 15y ago

Great!

kongqiu 15y ago
Thank you.

mikegreenberg 15y ago

Sorry about the slow reply. ParkGrades is a GREAT idea. There's similar things put up by the city, but they typically pale in comparison. This also does a pretty decent job of find all of our local parks near us (which many sites like this have failed miserably at). Excellent call to action. "Search for Parks" is the #1 thing to do at your site and you put that basically front-and-center all over the place. Many developers tend to miss this. Good job! A few things that I thought were curious: - After searching, I see "Museum Amenities" and then filter-like links which will reduce the result set to locations with certain characteristics. The title/purpose of this block here creates some end-user conflict on how to interact with it. You might consider changing the name to reflect it's purpose rather than it's description. (like "Filter by Amenity") - On the park search page, consider a different way to your "Advanced Search" description underneath. I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me to do, so you might want to have some sort of text fields with greyed-out, pre-populated examples. Try to use common conventions anywhere possible. Look at advanced search forms and try to get good ideas on how to lay them out. - The links to connect to Facebook, Twitter, RSS on the main page is offset from the elements themselves. In other words, the area to actually click a link is about 10px left of where they would line up with the image they represent. This was giving me unusual visual feedback on what was clickable and made me "miss" the click when I tried to click through. You're probably losing some valuable click-throughs here. - It looks like you're using Drupal for this site. I've noticed lots of areas where the design could be "tightened up". If you're still testing the market, that's one thing, but consider paying attention to this in the near future before any large-scale launches. Additionally, I think Drupal is a VERY extensible and fantastic CMS, but it's a BITCH to configure and manage. Keep this in mind going forward as you don't want to be too invested in a product that will ultimately hold back your site's long-term ambitions. Once you've validated the market, you should be thinking about how your technical choices will affect your product in the medium-long-term (1-3 years). Many people will say It's hard to plan this far ahead (especially with technology's current pace) but if you know that your site will really require the flexibility of Drupal versus a simpler CMS, you'd be better off knowing that sooner than later. - Open up your comments! There's no reason you can't use something like Disqus for handling it. You get better engagement and is one less hurdle for eventually acquiring users. (I've seen an implementation somewhere which onboards a Disqus account into a native user registration after a certain amount of repeat engagement with a user.) These are just a few suggestions off the top of my head. I can go into detail about any of these if I was ambiguous.

kongqiu 15y ago
Thank you -- much appreciated! I'll definitely work on: Improving the usability of the Amenity filters Re-writing/replacing the "Advanced Search" function and/or instructions. I agree, it's way too much work to figure out right now. Correcting links, exploring Disqus for comments Drupal is a pain but since I had zero programming experience, it's relatively easy to learn. I'm currently learning Rails and believe it or not, Drupal was a decent introduction to the programming world (for a total novice) Thanks again, Mike, really cool to help like this!

pkamb 15y ago

Some quick usability comments after 5 minutes on the site: The first thing you see on the homepage should be a map and list of parks in your area. Don't require a search, triangulate the location via IP or something. Use a map to show what's nearby. Also have a (ranked by grade) list to show what nearby parks are the best. I think the park recognition needs some work! http://i.imgur.com/XVFKF.png http://i.imgur.com/XVFKF.png Searching for "Seattle" or "New York City" don't return any results, I can only get it to work with zip codes. You often have to tap the "Enter" key twice to get it to actually search. Annoying, I kept thinking it didn't have any results for a term but it in fact never searched at all. I don't know what the little spinning circle thing in the search bar does. Just seems to get in the way of me pressing "Enter". When I type "98101" it shows "98101 (Seattle, WA)" in the autocomplete box. But clicking that doesn't add the extra info to the search box. It the autocomplete actually helping clarify the query?