- The site seems to be a little bit sluggish, especially as it is filtering your search results.
- The site is so crammed-full of information that it is a little bit hard to grasp what you're looking at or what results your clicking might have.
- While the site truly provides lots of valuable information, there is too much crammed onto the home page. The way the home page is laid out is not logical, and leaves the user scanning the page, unsure of what exactly they're looking at.
- There's really no clear sense of hierarchy, so it's hard to make sense of the information to find what you're looking for.
- There are so many links on this website (and it's not totally clear where clicking on the link will take you), so it's easy to quickly get way off-base from where you hoped to be.
- It can be a bit confusing to find your way back to the information you want using the links on the page, however the back-button in the browser seems to do that trick, although that can be a little time consuming depending how many wrong clicks have been made.
- After messing around on the site a little bit, it seems like users can begin to anticipate what links will take you where.
- For example, any link that is the name of an establishment will take you to that establishment's profile page.
- Any time you click on a descriptive keyword, such as "burgers" or "American", it will automatically enter that as a key word and filter your results by that term, providing you a list of restaurants within that category. It can be a bit confusing, though, if the term is "drink specials" and you click on it thinking that it will provide more detail, when in fact, it brings up a whole new list of restaurants with drink specials.
- For the extremely high number of links present on this site, the functionality seems to be pretty good. I didn't come across any broken links or error messages while exploring the site.
- One thing that we did notice in class, however, was that my screen and Nicole's screen were displaying differently even after we clicked on the same things. It seems like this site might just be so chaotic and complex that it is difficult to fine-tune exactly what results you will be seeing.
- Another minor thing I noticed was that some links take you away from the Urban Spoon site, whereas other open up in new windows, which I would imagine to be the preferred method so as not to allow people to easily navigate away from your site.
- There are some good features at work on this site, such as the use of the logo in the top right corner which links to the home screen and the presence of the search bar at the very top of the screen as part of the banner. Those are functions that users come to expect, so it's good to have those in an easy to see and understand place.
- The site absolutely makes all of the user's options visible, by listing out long groups of search options and tons of reviews/ratings etc. I think the site could actually benefit from having less information available right off-the-bat, but I guess they do a good job of laying out all of the information for the user to see so that they don't have to sift through too many pages to find what they're looking for.
- Although I am not totally sure what this heuristic is referring to (which must mean I'm a novice user!), I don't notice any ways in which this website could be tailored to each user's unique needs.
- As I've previously mentioned, there are great amounts of information on this website and it is all competing with each other so that there is no clear distinction between what information is important and what is less important.
- I think this site could benefit from shorter lists and words, perhaps more drop down menus rather than fully-visible lists and there are hardly any images on the site, and the ones that exist are small and insignificant. These are things we'd like to improve on for our site.
- I did not come across any error messages while using the site, so I guess that's a good sign!
- Again, I'm not totally sure what this heuristic is referencing, but I did see a section for FAQs on the bottom of the site, which can often be helpful when dealing with problems/issues.
Overall, I think that this site has great information and potential functionality, but the way it is designed is not doing it justice. It could be much more user friendly by not bombarding the users with every piece of information all at once. They could stand to add a lot of white space to their pages, opening them up and making them less cluttered with tons of words and links. The use of larger pictures would also make the site prettier to look at and would help direct your eyes around the page. Overall, I really just don't know where to look first and am overwhelmed by the homepage.
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