Community Journals, publisher of The Greenville Journal, released a wonderfully useful publication this weekend: Upstate Foodie.Regular recipients of The Greenville Journal received this new publication tucked inside their weekly Journal. Presumably, additional copies of the guide are available at pick-up locations around town where The Greenville Journal is normally available.
The Foodie guide is nicely sized for its purpose (I'll keep one in my car's glove compartment). The "Soup to Nuts" charts at the back of the guide is a great quick reference. And because wine and food go together, the guide also includes two pages on tasting techniques—one by Northampton's Richard deBondt, and a second page taken from Wine.com.
The publication has a website: http://www.upstatefoodie.com/. The above photos by T.J. Getz are only two of dozens from the rich visual parade that marches past when you connect to the site. The site is searchable and offers the opportunity to rate/review restaurants.
A couple of user interface annoyances mar an otherwise fine start: the site doesn't resize to fit your browser's width. If you don't routinely work with your browser maximized (occupying all of your screen real estate), the search box may be hidden. Worse still, "Become a Foodie" and the login link at far right completely disappear. Thankfully, once you've reached a restaurant page, although the same problem exists onscreen, the content will print properly on 8.5" x 11" paper, portrait orientation.
The search feature is the other oddity. When you type a restaurant name and hit return, a dialog box appears—requiring you to choose from Restaurants, Cuisines, or Locations. For a cuisine search (e.g., Asian), which might return multiple restaurants, the dialog box makes sense. But when seeking details for a specific restaurant, this step is confusing the first time and an annoyance afterward. Finally, be aware the search feature is rigidly literal—no helpful fuzzy search like Google, to suggest options if you don't spell something perfectly. Misspell Soby's without the apostrophe and you'll get a message, "No results found." Misspell Azia as Asia, and you'll get a list of Asian restaurants, but not the restaurant you were looking for.
5 comments:
Hey, I can't help but comment on your post to point out some errors. Your first critique paragraph about the website stated it was fixed width, which annoyed you. Your own blog has a fixed width too. As a matter of fact that is pretty standard. just like: Apple, Microsoft, CNN, MSN, FoxNews, etc. They all have fixed widths.
Your second critique was the functionality of the search as you type feature, pioneered by Google.
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Their suggests feature works almost identical to foodies other than the Foodies site breaks it one step further into categorizing your search results. While your comments were a fine start, I don't think they were accurate.
Hi Richard,
I'm one of the developers of the Upstate Foodie website and I can't tell you enough how excited we are about the site. We're always open to feedback and critiques as well and some of your suggestions are very good and will definitely be taken into account. Especially the search part.
The fixed width on a website is actually fairly common these days though and the 1024 width resolution (at least) is used by over 90% of web browsers today.
Websites are constantly improving pieces of software though so please keep an eye on the site as we continue to make some post-launch improvements, including some of your suggestions.
Thanks,
Barry
I am breaking my customary rule (no anonymous comments permitted) in an effort to be fair to Community Journals and their web developer, Mediasation.
That said, perhaps a couple of points are worth follow-up.
First, criticizing fixed-width sites that demand too much screen width is not an error, as “anonymous” suggests, but a criticism. Yes, my blog’s host—Blogspot.com—has has a fixed width, but I don't control Google. Wish I did! And Blogspot’s fixed-width is narrower than the Upstate Foodie site. In fact, Mediasation’s own site is narrower than Upstate Foodie. So are the fixed widths of Facebook.com and MySpace.com, two sites with just a bit of Web traffic. Yes, MySpace.com demands a lot of screen real estate on the splash page. Wonder why? Ah, that’s right: advertising! But go beyond their first screen and the width narrows.
Re: Microsoft, et al, I freely grant that a lot of companies are making the mistake of trying to grab too much screen real estate. That's exactly my point. And Microsoft is hardly the standard for good corporate behavior. But I was incredibly disappointed when the New York Times joined the increasingly large group of screen-hogs.
For those of us who carry lightweight laptops (13" screen, 3/4 inch thick, under four pounds; not a giant 17" screen piece of luggage), it seems that it is still legitimate to point out when a site demands more screen real estate than one window deserves. I keep multiple applications open simultaneously and toggle (ALT-Tab) between them.
Here’s the test of good behavior: go to Google.com. Manually narrow the width of your browser. The content adjusts to fit whatever window size you choose. That's polite. Sites that demand my whole screen are not.
Re: the functionality of the search feature, I was not suggesting "search as you type." I'm saying that once a search string is entered, if the term is spelled wrong, options are offered.
Try this: go to Google.com. Type in "lware valley" (famous wine region spelled more or less phonetically). Hit return. What you'll get, at the top of your results page, is "Did you mean loire valley?" (which is, of course, the correct spelling of "Loire" and allows the user to find what he or she was seeking). That is what's missing from Upstate Foodie.
Finally—and with thanks for the very different tone than the comment from anonymous—I appreciated your nice note, Barry! Looking forward to the next iteration of the Foodie site. The idea is wonderful. The photography is stunning. Hope that some of the constructive criticism can be incorporated.
I received yet another comment, by a local software developer, about my post concerning Upstate Foodie's website. We're engaged in a pointless conversation. Here's why:
+ My original post was intended as kudos to Community Journals for a gorgeous publication. The focus of this blog is wine, not web user interface design.
+ The comments on both sides are opinions. I can say, “Grabbing too much screen real estate is impolite.” Those who feel differently can respond, “But a lot of sites do” or “the web is a living, breathing application.” We all are correct.
+ Every comment writer but Barry missed the key point, “Wow, we can disagree, but thanks for the input—because user feedback makes every site better.”
The writer of the most recent comment said, “Your post caused quite a stir in the local technical community” and “I don’t think you grasp what the Internet is about.” Maybe so, but here is Vine & Grape is about: wine, not the local technology community. For the record, however (and then we’re shutting this thread down):
+ UNIX gave me my start in the early 1980s, and that was before most people know what the Internet was. Later, I was laughed at for saying, “You’ll have a URL on your business card someday.”
+ Despite Vine & Grape’s focus on wine, my background is technology and publishing—as VP and Editor in Chief for a technology evaluation service purchased by Gartner Group; then as Senior VP of a group of computer magazines written for software developers, including Dr. Dobb’s Journal and Microsoft Systems Journal.
+ An Internet start-up, for which I served as VP Business Development, was acquired by America Online in 1995.
+ Finally, a research team I led created one of the first widely acclaimed studies of Internet audience behavior. See this link in The New York Times. I was later invited by Donna Hoffman, quoted in that article, to speak at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management about our research.
Has the Web continued to change? Of course it has. But here’s what has not changed: the Web is still just a communications medium. Pick your app: YouTube, eBay, MySpace, NYTimes.com, or Upstate Foodie. The purpose is to link people and deliver information. If it doesn’t fulfill that purpose, it’s only a pile of code.
I responded to the Upstate Foodie web site as a user. I won’t be the only user annoyed by the site’s pixel width and lack of fuzzy-search. But as I said originally, “Fine start.” Those quibbles are about stuff that can be fixed. Nicolas Negroponte, head of the MIT Media Lab, is famous for ending arguments like this by saying, “The answer is never ‘either-or.’ It is always ‘both-and.’”
Happy to continue the discussion by email (click link in my profile). But for now, let’s all just grab a glass of wine, listen to users, and enjoy life. And now, back to Vine & Grape.
Hi Richard,
I wanted to followup with you again to let you know that we've made several post-launch improvements to the website. Although the search still isn't quite where we want it to be yet, we have done our best to improve the accuracy of search results (including filtering certain characters on quotations so that "sobys" will find "soby's"), also including restaurant features like 'Sunday Brunch' and 'Extensive Wine List' in the result set.
We've got a plan in place for a more comprehensive search function that would allow us to handle misspellings, but that is going to take some time to properly setup and test.
Additionally, we've made a lot of improvements which users probably won't notice (which is the idea) mostly revolving around performance improvements to the site and a lot of detail work.
Just wanted to send you an update to let you know we're listening.
Thanks for all of the comments,
Barry
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