

Ask HN: review my app whereslunch.org - gregstoll

I've been working on whereslunch.org as a side project and I'd love good feedback on it.  It's designed to help you find new restaurants to try for lunch.<p>If you create an account you can rate restaurants and get suggestions about restaurants you might like.  (and you can sign in with OpenID!)
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kbrower
when buying a domain make sure the ______.com of your __ __ __.org isn't porn

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gregstoll
Sorry about that! Good, clear domain names are a little hard to come by. I
probably should have thought of a more clever name...

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mrtron
Hahaha....who would have guessed a name like that would be a porn site though?

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thasmin
I really like the concept. A few suggestions for the UI:

1\. Why make me choose a city at all? Start me at the US and let me enter an
address and show all places on the map.

2\. The map is very small. At the minimum it should take up the available
area. Keep the same height / width ratio if that looks better.

3\. The color codes should be visible from the start so I know what I'm
looking at. I'd suggest moving it above the map and out of the tabbed part.

4\. Make the Top Rated part into a table with columns and alternate colored
rows. It looks messy.

5\. The tags section is messy too. Give me a list of tags and the number of
restaurants in each tag and let me click. And definitely don't show me tags
that don't have restaurants.

6\. Actually, dump the tags and categorize the restaurants. There's too much
potential for an overabundance of tags.

7\. The text in locality filter overlaps.

8\. I'm not a fan of popups in general because it covers too much of the map
and makes it very difficult to click another restaurant. Consider moving all
of the info on the popup to the area below the map.

In general, figure out why people are coming to your website and engineer the
UI to fit that purpose. I would think people are looking for where to go out
to lunch because of your domain name (which looks it may change). So let them
zoom into their office and see all of the places within a few miles. Colored
pins are good but your customers have to know what they're looking at.

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pclark
comments:

Hurrah, email optional & no verification & having a delete my account button!

I think you need to prettyfy your UI! Little bit of CSS and curves goes a long
way :)

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lacker
You default to Austin, Texas. Why not detect the user's location from their IP
address? Even if it isn't perfect, it's better than always guessing Texas.

Also, it would be nice to see more about a restaurant than just a name and a
rating. I can't really trust the ratings when there's only one or two per
restaurant, so give me something more to base my decision on.

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tjr
I tried to add a restaurant in my city, and I could either (a) add a new
restaurant or (b) add a new location. It took me a while to come to the
conclusion that adding a new location meant adding a new instance of a chain
of restaurants, adding a new restaurant meant adding a new chain. (I think.)

So okay, I'll start by adding the nearby Chick-Fil-A, because that chain is
already in the system. I add a new location, including the street address and
zip code, and... nothing. My city isn't in the drop-down menu. I guess it
didn't get added?

Hmm, well, wait a minute, when I click on Chick-fil-A from the rating listing
on the right, there are two locations, one in Austin, and one in... Cedar
Rapids! There we go! So my entry did get added, but Cedar Rapids wasn't added
to the drop-down menu of locations.

I found the whole experience fairly confusing.

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truebosko
I like it.

However, my personal primary issue with your app is that when I go to it to
find lunch, it's just too much information. When I'm looking for lunch I don't
want to spend 10 minutes browsing around and researching. I want something
quick.

Suggest me a few places that might fit a criteria. Have a quick-access menu
(e.g tag cloud) or search so I can quickly type in what I feel like and get
the results filtered.

I know this is all available in your app, but in my opinion it's to hard to
find to engage the user.

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rogercosseboom
At first I have to question how this can compete with places like Yelp, etc.
(we have a dumber app here in NYC called menupages.com) but your use of Google
Maps totally sold me.

I would suggest changing the language regarding accounts, specifically instead
of 'login with openid' which some people may not have heard of, just have a
register button. Also, definitely have an option for users to submit
restaurant menu links to the restaurants they've reviewed.

Great job!

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jdbeast00
I don't get why this is getting good reviews. How is it different from the
already-established sites? Even google does it itself on google maps.

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gregstoll
I tried to distinguish by adding good tag and filtering capabilities, eg.
looking for a place that serves asian food that takes less than 10 minutes.

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lonestar
I assumed you were choosing location based on IP, but I guess I'm just lucky
to live in North Austin.

It wasn't clear to me what I could do once I created an account until I read
deep into the site; some text on the homepage like "Create an account to add
restaurants and ratings" would help.

I'll definitely start using this, good work!

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axod
Create an account:

"Internal Server Error"

Boo :(

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gregstoll
That's weird - are you still seeing this?

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axod
I saw it if I selected Cambridge _then_ tried to sign up. If I selected
somewhere else and clicked on sign up, it worked.

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gregstoll
Thanks for the info. I'll take a look at it sometime soon...

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EGF
Would love to have this populated for the NYC area.

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gregstoll
Yeah, the big problem is where to pull data from legally. I'm definitely open
to suggestions!

Went ahead and added NYC as a city.

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jskopek
I've been thinking of building something along the lines of this, but the data
required was always the limiting factor for me.

Where do you get your data? Do you use Yelp's API, do a little data scraping,
or are there sources with this stuff?

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gregstoll
That's the problem - all the restaurants on the site were entered manually by
me (and my friends).

Taking a quick look at the Yelp API TOS, it looks like you might be able to
use their data. (but of course I'm not a lawyer)

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joshwa
I have something vaguely similar -- <http://lunchmapr.com/>

Though it's more focused on private/smallgroup sharing.

I've been considering a refactor lately to enable more lightweight list
sharing, and having some kind of collaborative database of restaurants,
ratings, etc.

Was considering scraping the NYC Health Inspection database to seed the
data... citysearch and menupages don't license, yelp doesn't permit you to
show any reviews but theirs...

There's also this: <http://www.freebase.com/view/dining/restaurant>

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pclark
awesome, wish there was a UK equivalent.

How about you make a Cambridge, UK version and I'll try to get some people to
use it?

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gregstoll
I went ahead and added a location for Cambridge - let me know if you're able
to add locations or not, since I haven't tested the geocoding in the UK...

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axod
Have to change things like ZIP... Not enough characters permitted for UK
postcodes.

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gregstoll
OK - now zip should function as a postcode as well. (characters permitted, up
to length 10)

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pclark
awesome! my girlfriend would love to make you a logo if you're interested?

drop me an email and I'll put you in contact. peter [\at] omgponi.es

