People absolutely love the idea of the MM travel website. They react with a lot of enthusiasm.. that is: until they bump into a lot of navigation problems which are very related to each other. I'll set out the main issues we discovered and what we're going to do to fix them.
De flap.
The appearing drop-down menu that I was talking about earlier, doesn't stand out. People don't notice it and don't understand why important functions (like 'be my guide') are put in there. They DO like the box when we make them aware of it. So the easiest solution is: don't make the 'flap' appear anymore, just make it something always visible, make it fixed. This is how the flap looks right now:
Next we're gonna add new functions to the flap, making it like an interaction-information-easy-to-navigate-thingy. New functions people asked for:
-Review guide/testimonials/ rating: at least something that would make the guide credible
-Ask a question: People want to be able to see someone else's questions and make them themselves, without having to go into the private e-mail-area.
-Stories: They want to add their stories, and read others.
-Profile guide: Of course it would be nice to check someone's personal profile before contacting them.
-Share this.
-Flag this.
Mouse over.
The next main issue is the mouse over. You can only distinguish between an image or a guide if you mouse over the images. Still the participants tend to not mouse over anything at all! And if they do, it's too short of a time to really notice a change in the image or functionality. Can you imagine people using laptops mousing over items? No. So we made a guide page more obvious by allowing for the item to have -GUIDE- displayed.
A Map!
People in the guides page looking for a guide in a particular destination, give up after searching and scrolling all the way down. I can't blame them. It's not clear where the guide is from, you have to mouse over the item to discover that. After that you have to search for your particular city by mousing over and reading all the guide-items. No wonder they go back to the cities page and try too find their guide there (which they don't..).
Any solution? Yes, a map with all the guides over the world. In that way you can find your guide(s) in a wink of an eye. Looking for a guide in South-Africa? Or just Buenos Aires: it's all clear and traceable.
Time to wrap up. O, just one last thing. While discussing a minimum number of items a guide should create in order to become guide-worthy, we started thinking about a participation-reward system. So that people will get more involved and motivated in the network. I'll come back on that one the next time. For now we have to make sure the site has a good base. With that I mean: a clear navigation, profile and interaction functions.
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