Using your site
Lea McNulty
via web
Hello, Nabewise and congrats on the many new features you've added to your website.
I came today to browse around a little. Here is some feedback I hope you will consider.
1) Berlin, DE sounds like Berlin Delaware. Maybe, since I think this is Berlin in Europe, Germany or whatever, you may want to distinguish it as Europe. Maybe have a separate drop down for Europe and US so as not to befuddle the less travelled... ;-)
2) If I were thinking of traveling to Atlanta, I might not care about where the Gays live or which is a family neighborhood. Personally, I'd like to know where the museums were, or where the sightseeing was good. Those items aren't included in "nightlife" if I'm not a party girl... If your website is for travelers and movers, alike, maybe another option on your drop down "What's important to you?" menu would be good. None of them addressed the things that were important to me. :-(
3) I'd like to browse a city. But I don't want to select what's important to me. How do I do that? It seems I have to choose, and that feels forced. Maybe I'm just looking, or maybe I don't know what's important to me yet. I like architecture. Maybe I want to look at the pictures of Atlanta and just poke around looking first. Then I will look at the qualities of the neighborhoods I like the look of. Can I do that? It doesn't feel like I can... :-(
I am bragging about your beautiful website to my friends. They are middle-aged type people who like to travel. They aren't moving and aren't all into techie stuff but they have money and computers and iPads, etc, so they are definitely "on the web". I'm not sure they will be able to navigate (read that as "browse") the way they will want to...
Maybe Nabewise isn't thinking to go in that direction, but thought you might be interested in my feedback.
Your site is beautiful to look at, but I'm finding it more difficult to use than when you first started.
Good luck to all of you.
-Lea
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Support Staff 2 Posted by zack on 29 Nov, 2011 07:53 PM
Hi Lea,
Thanks for writing in, and thanks for the kind words.
In regards to your first point, you are totally right, Berlin, DE does sound like Delaware, and I'll be fixing this issue shortly. I love your idea to have Europe and North America drop downs, and once we get more European cities I imagine we will implement something very similar to this. Sometime in the next six months, and likely sooner, we will have many more European cities on the site for you to explore.
It's true that our site is much more centered on the mover than the traveler right now. As much as we would love to be able to help the traveler out more, right now we simply don't have the resources to implement those features which would be more interesting to the traveler than the mover. I agree that it would be wonderful to be able to see what tourist attractions are located in a nabe, and whether it has great sightseeing or other touristy type things. As we grow and get more resources, these are all ideas that I would love to implement, and make NabeWise more than just a mover's tool.
As far as simply browsing a city, you can absolutely do that! There are a couple ways to do it too. From a main city page, you can click on "Nabe Directory" on the blue bar directly under the main photograph of the city. This will take you to a listing of all the nabes in the city, with a brief description of each and a photo. From there, you click on nabes to get their main pages.
Another way to browse a city is from a nabe map page. From the big map page you can click on all the surrounding nabes to get links to their main pages. On a nabe page, you can also click on any nabes listed in the "nearby nabes" section and virtually wander the city, which I find myself doing a lot, probably too much really. You say it doesn't feel like you can do this, which is an issue I find to be troubling, and will spend some time looking at how it all works, to make it more apparent that you can just browse a city if you'd like. We are all so familiar with the site, it's hard to see issues like this sometimes.
Thanks for bragging about us! That makes us all warm and fuzzy and happy. I find it very interesting that you say the site is harder to use now than it was when we first started. I imagine that is a result of the growth the site has gone through, but I would be very interested to know in more detail how it's more difficult to use, if you would be so kind.
Thank you so much for your email, we love feedback from our users, and we always take it to heart. If there is anything I can do for you, or if you have any questions, please email me.
Thanks again, and take care.
Zack Walker
Senior Cartographer
***@nabewise.com
zack closed this discussion on 29 Nov, 2011 07:53 PM.