28 days later: Our improvements after Ask HN
At gtrot, we’re working to build the best city discovery tool on the web. In order to make it the best, we constantly ask feedback from our customers online, in person and across the web. 28 days ago was no exception. We asked the incredibly tech-savvy and generous community at Hacker News to give us their honest feedback on the latest updates to http://gtrot.com. As a thank you to the community, we wanted to showcase the high level feedback we’ve received and how we’ve taken it to heart.
If you want to see the full feedback and original post, go here: Ask HN: Review my startup, gtrot.com
Feedback & Fixes:
1) Blue background a bit harsh
New Color Scheme — we’d been kicking around how to make the focus more on content. Mission accomplished.
2) Homepage search bar should show activation
Green button after you pick from the drop down. More improvements coming soon.
3) Login to Facebook popup lrequest after searching
All personalization starts with creating an account through Facebook connect, we want customers to use it, but added more information on “Why”
4) Results speed
We’ve made significant investment in improving the speed of displayed results and user experience
5) Geolocation search with the map
We have a full map view and the locations located on the right side-bar for easy browsing
6) Better events
We’ve updated our import for higher quality event content
7) Education on how things are being ranked
We custom rank content from the best suggestions down to generic content for over 5,000 cities, we now have an ‘edu-interstitial” to help first time users understand this.
8) Too much animation on item hover
Unbolded text, less animation
In the Pipeline:
- Infinite scroll- Descriptive URLs (we know, very soon)
- Mobile (coming very, very soon)
- Location-aware: Use current computer location to immediately show local results
- Picture quality: We’ve built a custom solution to help improve image quality in major cities (improvements in next 10 days)
- Local offers and deals: more cities and more relevant offers (next 7 days)
Comments we love:
“Overall, this is really excellent. My town is small but near Silicon Valley, and this does a great job of showing me stuff that’s actually near me. Well done!”
“The explore page UX/UI is gorgeous. Very well done.”“Very neat site though, I could see myself using it.”
“I expected to see nothing when typing in “Tokushima, Japan”, but was amazed to see a lot of content. This is actually as good as the human written guides available online.”
“I think people naturally like sharing new places and experiences with people.”“I expected to see nothing when typing in “Tokushima, Japan”, but was amazed to see a lot of content. This is actually as good as the human written guides available online.”
HUGE THANKS to everyone in the HN community who took the time to give us feedback.
Have more feedback? Send it our way! contact (at) gtrot.com, @gtrot or http://facebook.com/socialtravel.
