

Ask HN: Critique my Startup BarBird - plamb

(I realized I posted this in the wrong board earlier, apologies)<p>Hi guys, we resigned from our jobs and started building http://www.barbird.com full time about five and a half months ago. BarBird shows a real-time picture of what is happening around you in the nightlife scene so you can make informed nightlife decisions. There is currently a free iPhone/Android app as well as the web app. Would love to hear your feedback!
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codeslush
I can tell your team has put a lot of time into this. It's interesting and
possibly very valuable. My feedback below:

1\. Orange County is NOT Los Angeles! :-) If you're trying to not clutter up
the map with too many dots then maybe pick state first, then zoom in and
present regions/counties within the state. I was almost disinterested in it
until I figured out the regions within the region!

2\. If I click the dot twice, make the div disappear or reappear. I had to
click on a different dot to get to the one I really wanted again (e.g. click
Los Angeles, then click San Diego, then try to click Los Angeles again)

3\. The div with the tweets in them is somewhat strange when hidden. Too much
is showing or something. Maybe it's just the ugly arrow to expand???

4\. The floating tip helper is distracting. Can't you must make a static info
bar or something? I dunno, maybe just me.

5\. The region ul - where you give extra regions - make it a little prettier.
Everything else looks so polished, and then that list looks not so polished.
Make it look nice like the "Happy Hour, Specials, Live Music...."

6\. I'm wondering if the UI would be more "natural" if you had a static div
along top with the logo/region/info bar and facebook and add venue buttons.
Then, on left, just have the categories and the pop-out div for tweets. This
would allow you to reduce the width of the main div quite a bit and might end
up with just as much (or more) map space. But specifically, I think this would
be more visually appealing to the eye. Surround the entire map a border of
some sort that's blackish in color like your main div. It will feel more like
an app then. TO ME!

Hope this helps. Congrats! A good idea and a lot of work. Very promising.

p.s. - All my input from web app on chrome browser.

~~~
plamb
Great feedback, I like some of these ideas thanks codeslush!

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goo
My perspective, mostly on UX issues:

The splash page has weird workflow- the only way to go somewhere is by
clicking on the tiny red dot and then clicking the button. At the very least
increase the click radius for the red button, ideally add an on hover that
shows where is (eg San Francisco) and have the button click take them there..
Also, clicking on the states feels like it should do something, since the
cursor is the "pointer hand" but it does nothing except change the location
hash and make it harder for me to click the back button.

As for the bar view- graceful loading of page elements would be a big help. It
took more than 6 seconds for me to load the content on first load, and it
takes a fair amount of time to load between the tabs. I suggest some sort of
spinny thing that acknowledges the waiting process as something to help stop
me from closing the tab right then and there.

(I just took a look at what's making it so slow- it looks like you're pulling
down >50 tiny individual pngs- you should probably squish that into a much
smaller number of sprites, also same goes for putting all your jquery stuff
into one file)

That's really what strikes me most about it right now- usually if a page
doesn't load within a second or so for me, you're going to have a hard time
convincing me to come back to it, and it would be a shame if all the work you
have clearly put into a decent idea is negated by a slow ui.

~~~
plamb
Thank you goo-- we've had a number of complaints about the speed of the web
app and we're definitely focused on speeding that up. What has been holding
back that development is that all the buzz we've gotten thus far has been
around the mobile apps, so we've been working on making those valuable and bug
free. We will be moving up the priority of speeding up the web app.

Spreading our focus across three products and 50 cities so early on was
probably a mistake, but we will make up for it.

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lhorie
First impressions:

\- the UI makes sense if I bother to spend more than 30 seconds playing with
it, but it's hard to tell what it does at first. Maybe add a tag line or a
brief description for the non-mobile users.

\- has actual content for major cities that are not in the US. Impressed.

\- looks polished overall

\- how are you monetizing?

~~~
plamb
We've toyed with taglines at the top and once the iPhone app/Android app were
done we wanted to use that space to advertise. We definitely need to work
something short back in there.

We have a few different ideas for monetization; the most obvious one is
auctioning off that 'hot tweet' area on a nightly basis; that is seen by every
web/mobile user. I like it because these are advertisements our users would
actually want to see.

~~~
lhorie
Btw, I'm not your target demographic, but I have to say you have a nice useful
app. Kudos all around.

~~~
plamb
Great to hear, thanks lhorie

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mapster
Super. Great content. A map tweak: plug in new coordinates for some of the
cities (i.e Boston and NY). When I zoomed to 2nd level it placed me in an
irrelevant part of town, or toward the outskirts.

Ideally when user sees map and zooms to street level the end result would be
'in the middle of the action' so to speak.

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delano
_This is the BarBird open beta. Expect some things to not work right!_

That's cute. I like it.

It looks like it could be an interested app but none of the tweet content
loaded for Seattle or San Fran. Maybe post again when that's working.

~~~
plamb
That's very odd; it works great on Chrome/FF4, works decently on Safari and
IE8+; anything less than IE8 doesn't work. Which browser were you using?

~~~
delano
Here's a screenshot after a minute or so: <http://cl.ly/1J0V1R2h1r2H2N3y401Y>

_Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16
(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.127 Safari/534.16_

~~~
plamb
Very weird. Thank you for the info, we will look at this.

Do you potentially have a plugin that blocks tweets from being loaded?

~~~
delano
Nope!

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bricestacey
It looks neat, but it's practically unusable for me. It's very choppy on
OSX10.6 and Chrome 10.0.648.133 beta.

~~~
plamb
We just got a nice little Mac Mini so we will be testing/fixing the bugs on
OSX.

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brk
Just tried it on my iPad, nothing happens when I click the red dot for Boston.

~~~
plamb
Really? That just executes a couple lines of CSS. Should that work on an iPad?

Here is the direct link to Boston: <http://bos.barbird.com>

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SoWink
Good concept, except the webpage loads very slowly for me.

~~~
plamb
Hi SoWink, what OS/Browser are you using?

