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April 18, 2005 08:55 AM
Broken: Zagat.com redesign
Steve Hoffman writes that Zagat.com's redesign is broken:
The bad idea was taking away the ability to set your location based on the print edition of Zagat altogether. There's a reason why the print editions are segragated the way they are, and not making them available as "locations" on the website was a huge mistake.
(Makes me wonder - didn't this come up in customer research? You DO talk to customers, don't you? -mh)
Sorry it should say this.
It might not be zagat, but it might have been the sight designer that did that
unknown,
At the end of the day though this is affecting zagat's business whether it was an internal or external site designer. The interesting thing about this is that at first glance the new way is more convenient for people, but any time there is a significantly large user base, eventually you'll find a user that was impacted negatively by a change.
The solution to this would be to have both ways of searching for the information, one way by region, and another by distance.
The radius approach may make sense for some, but it really assumes that all directions from your location are equally desirable. I suspect that this assumption is not true for a much higher number of customers than the designer imagined.
Uh, see:
http://www.zagat.com/verticals/LocationSelect.aspx?N=120&Ne=119&VID=8
"Browse Our Locations OR Enter Street Address"
You can do it either way. Did they really just fix it in 2 days?
Anyway, I live in the middle of nowhere, so entering my home address and searching a 20 mile radius makes perfect sense for me.
Actually, they didn't fix it, although I wish they did. They still don't offer a choice for Southern NY State on that location list. There's still time for them to add it though!
Actually, the new site design seems like a loser in many ways. I have yet to figure out how to efficiently search by multiple criteria, the way the old advanced search let you look for barbeque in east 60's with 20 points food rating. In general I'm using many more clicks to get the same information.
Is anyone else confused by the "Details" section, which is filled with hot links that just refresh the page and change which detail is highlighted? What does it all mean?
For those interested, I can say that although this is not fixed (yet?), at least Zagat listens to their customers. Read my update here:
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Previous: Western Digital warning | Main | Next: nikewomen.com store locator
It might be not zagat, but the site designer that did that
Posted by: unknown at April 18, 2005 09:47 AM