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Just my personal thoughts as a hiker; not a hacker, HNer or what ever. Firstly: Dont be disheartened by my criticism which will follow. Its a decent first atte
by alan_cx 13y ago
Just my personal thoughts as a hiker; not a hacker, HNer or what ever.
Firstly: Dont be disheartened by my criticism which will follow. Its a decent first attempt, the idea is absolutely worth working on, and could become a valuable resource for a lot of people. On to the criticism....
What goes in the search? Are hikes named? Do I need to know the name to search for? Search for a location? From the first page, what do I expect from the site?
I click discover. Nice pictures. Click one. A description. I expected a map and what not. Not a big blob of text. Why not trail mini map?
As after a few click I didn't see anything useful, I gave up.
I don't initially see what the site is doing or offering. First think I think of looking for hikes is a map of the hike, where it is and the route itself. That tells me a hell of a lot in one go. Where it is, the terrain, length, and so on. Having seen that, then I want information.
I would add a defined difficulty level. Family hike? Casual hike? Hike for the experienced? What kit level? Do I need more than boots? And so on.
UI. Now, I don't like the flat design thing. Thats me. But, I was relieved to see you didn't got the the awful for ever scrolling down thing. So, this "asshole" (I was called that here for not liking those sites) is happy about that!!! But, on a serious note, in my experience, hikers tend to be older, and it might be that a more traditional site would be better suited. I dont know, but it might be worth trying to understand who is likely to use your site and find out what sort of UI they like to use. Or maybe offer a couple of skins ot layouts, one for trendy people and one for us old crusties.
Personally, I think the whole thing need a fundamental re-think, from landing page onwards. It is great idea. Hiking is an area which could do with a damn good info source. IMHO, there are a lot of problems. But, like I said, keep working on it. Its worth it, and I can see you do seem to have the skills to make it work.
Personally, I look forward to V2. Best of luck. It is a good idea, had huge potential, and I'd like to see it progress.
- zakn 13y agoI appreciate the feedback, especially as a fellow hiker. A number of people now have mentioned that the first page is not working, so that's something I'm going to reevaluate. I need more info there beyond a daunting search box. At the moment, you can type in the name of a hike and it will show up, e.g. try "The Narrows". The site assumes hikes are named. If you're searching for a location, then you need to go to the maps. I should probably support searching for a location via the search box, e.g. if you search for colorado it will show you all the hikes in colorado, or zoom you into colorado on the map. Maps. Currently the way to get to the maps is from the lat / lng link in the info box on the side. This will take you to a full screen map with a dot for that location. From here, I'd like to add support for GPX routes, but that is not implemented. It's interesting that you're keen on having maps as the focus because I find that maps aren't that useful for me when researching a hike, I just want the highlights - distance, elevation gain, elevation max, and then I want to see pictures of what the hike has to offer. Thanks for the encouragement, I'm taking a lot from these comments and will have plenty to work on.
- INTPenis 13y agoYeah don't give up on this, I've wanted a site like yours for years now. But like the first poster said, there are some usability issues to fix. Not sure if this was mentioned but for me the landing page works but I immediately click on Map because I don't know what to search for. Do place names show hikes in a specific radius? If so, what's the radius? So map was much more straight forward to me, but when I then click on a red dot on the map I can't return to where I was on the map and the only way is to click Map again and return to the north american continent view.
- zakn 13y agoI'm not sure I understand the question: "Do place names show hikes in a specific radius?" Are you talking about the orange dots on the map? They correspond to a single hike. That is annoying that the map doesn't remember where you were. Seems like the best way to handle that is to store your last location in localstore.
- atjoslin 13y agoHe means if I type 'Seattle, WA' then what is the 'search radius' around Seattle that I will get for hikes?
- zakn 13y agoAh got it. At the moment, it would tell you that there are no hikes named "Seattle", since search only works on the name of the hike. When I add support for searching by location (because this seems to be a popular request), then I think it should zoom you into the location, enough so that you could see all of Seattle. I think this can be done with google's jsapi / google maps but I'm going to have to investigate.
- coldpie 13y agoIf the purpose of the site is to find new hikes, presumably we don't already know the name of the hike we want :) What I expected was a location-based thing: show me hikes near where I live. I would find that tremendously useful. Good start!
- blaze33 13y agoI was also going to suggest mini-maps. I would suggest you look at camptocamp.org, it's run by a french non profit (CC data, also has an english interface) and has a lot of users posting their hikes. It's pretty useful if you want fresh data about the terrain conditions of your future hike. They have a split by activities (just hiking, rock climbing, ice climbing, etc.) and also by hiking grade, height diff up, etc. On a personal note I have a small webapp I used to share my location while hiking alone: http://gr5.herokuapp.com/ http://gr5.herokuapp.com/ it has mini-maps based on the gps data I uploaded at the end of each day.
- arethuza 13y agoI like Walk Highlands - but it's only for Scotland: http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/ http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/ and Geograph: http://www.geograph.org.uk/ http://www.geograph.org.uk/
- transistor-man 13y agoAdding a captcha for the editing mode would be a good call, at the moment anyone can add anything, looking forward to the future of this site!