

Feedback on Fishing startup: FishBlab - jjunkin

http://www.fishblab.com
Looking for feedback, particularly UX/UI. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!
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dcpdx
Congrats on the site. I'm not much of a fisherman, but I've been out on the
Columbia here in Oregon a few times for Spring and Fall Chinook. Good eats.

I'm not formally a designer, but I fancy myself a fairly decent UX/UI guy and
think I can offer some basic suggestions.

1) In your header, I would keep the Fishblab logo where it is, move the "Map
Driven Fishing Community" tagline up next to/under the logo, and move the
Login/New Account creation to the upper-right corner. Then, move your menu
down to where the tagline and login currently reside. Right now, there's a lot
of wasted space where the menu could be, and it seems awkwardly balanced to
the left.

2) Remove the huge "Fishblab" logo in the main section. It's redundant, and
doesn't really do anything for the users. What to put in its place? Add
something for the user to do, like input their location or a type of fish
they're looking for. Or, make this space a dynamic feed for other site
content, like photos and forum posts.

3) Minimize your use of tag clouds. These were cool a few years ago and you
still see them a bit today, but users may be overwhelmed at the sheer amount
of them on your homepage. Think of your most prominent use cases for the site,
and mold your homepage content around that.

4) Move the menu in the main section (Photos, Catch, etc.) over to the right
or left side and turn them into actions the user can make. Instead of
"Photos", make it "View and Submit Photos" or something like that.

5) Please, please allow for authentication from other sites like Facebook and
Twitter. This will increase your trial and retention rates and allow you to
leverage the size of those networks with your users and gain greater
visibility. Let people tweet stuff and post stuff to Facebook!

6) Not really a UX/UI thing but it'd be really cool if you pulled information
from each state's Fish & Wildlife Department website. You could probably write
a fairly simple program to pull this info and dynamically display it on your
site according to the user's location.

I could make a dozen other small suggestions but they'd mostly be nitpicking
and personal opinion. Overall, I really like the concept and see a real need
if there's nothing currently in this space (well, even if there is). I see you
guys as a sort of "Yelp for fishermen"; you could probably take a few design
and functional cues from their site to kickstart the ideation process.

Cheers and good luck!

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jjunkin
These are great suggestions, thanks for taking the time to make them. I agree
with the header menu suggestions. I have been thinking about replacing the
huge logo with a search box so I agree getting rid of it would be a good idea.
I will be spending some going through your list as we continue to refine the
landing pages and menus. Thanks so much for the detailed suggestions, they are
extremely helpful!

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maxdemarzi
I think the site concept is great, but the UI looks like it was built in 1994.

I am no designer, but what I did is find a nice looking template on
<http://themeforest.net> and modify it to meet my needs. Tabs, split windows,
jquery sliders, quite a few of the templates us the same elements. Just find
one you like.

Some people see fishing as a serious activity, others as a family activity.
You can tailor the look of the site to either demographic. For the family
theme, adding a nice "mascot" like a puffer fish could help.
<http://graphicriver.net/item/puffer-fish/102251>

Can you try mine? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2689356>

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jjunkin
thanks for the suggestions. Your site has a clean design. Looks like a cool
idea for tracking tech skills - I will take a closer look. Thanks!

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jjunkin
<http://www.fishblab.com>

