Ask HN: Critique my Startup BarBird

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2315087

by plamb • 15 years ago

11 20 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

(I realized I posted this in the wrong board earlier, apologies)

Hi guys, we resigned from our jobs and started building http://www.barbird.com full time about five and a half months ago. BarBird shows a real-time picture of what is happening around you in the nightlife scene so you can make informed nightlife decisions. There is currently a free iPhone/Android app as well as the web app. Would love to hear your feedback!

delano3• 15 years ago

This is the BarBird open beta. Expect some things to not work right!

That's cute. I like it.

It looks like it could be an interested app but none of the tweet content loaded for Seattle or San Fran. Maybe post again when that's working.

plamb9• 15 years ago

That's very odd; it works great on Chrome/FF4, works decently on Safari and IE8+; anything less than IE8 doesn't work. Which browser were you using?

delano3• 15 years ago

Here's a screenshot after a minute or so: http://cl.ly/1J0V1R2h1r2H2N3y401Y

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.127 Safari/534.16

lhorie2• 15 years ago

First impressions:

- the UI makes sense if I bother to spend more than 30 seconds playing with it, but it's hard to tell what it does at first. Maybe add a tag line or a brief description for the non-mobile users.

- has actual content for major cities that are not in the US. Impressed.

- looks polished overall

- how are you monetizing?

plamb9• 15 years ago

We've toyed with taglines at the top and once the iPhone app/Android app were done we wanted to use that space to advertise. We definitely need to work something short back in there.

We have a few different ideas for monetization; the most obvious one is auctioning off that 'hot tweet' area on a nightly basis; that is seen by every web/mobile user. I like it because these are advertisements our users would actually want to see.

lhorie2• 15 years ago

Btw, I'm not your target demographic, but I have to say you have a nice useful app. Kudos all around.

brk• 15 years ago

Just tried it on my iPad, nothing happens when I click the red dot for Boston.

plamb9• 15 years ago

Really? That just executes a couple lines of CSS. Should that work on an iPad?

Here is the direct link to Boston: http://bos.barbird.com

codeslush• 15 years ago

I can tell your team has put a lot of time into this. It's interesting and possibly very valuable. My feedback below:

1. Orange County is NOT Los Angeles! :-) If you're trying to not clutter up the map with too many dots then maybe pick state first, then zoom in and present regions/counties within the state. I was almost disinterested in it until I figured out the regions within the region!

2. If I click the dot twice, make the div disappear or reappear. I had to click on a different dot to get to the one I really wanted again (e.g. click Los Angeles, then click San Diego, then try to click Los Angeles again)

3. The div with the tweets in them is somewhat strange when hidden. Too much is showing or something. Maybe it's just the ugly arrow to expand???

4. The floating tip helper is distracting. Can't you must make a static info bar or something? I dunno, maybe just me.

5. The region ul - where you give extra regions - make it a little prettier. Everything else looks so polished, and then that list looks not so polished. Make it look nice like the "Happy Hour, Specials, Live Music...."

6. I'm wondering if the UI would be more "natural" if you had a static div along top with the logo/region/info bar and facebook and add venue buttons. Then, on left, just have the categories and the pop-out div for tweets. This would allow you to reduce the width of the main div quite a bit and might end up with just as much (or more) map space. But specifically, I think this would be more visually appealing to the eye. Surround the entire map a border of some sort that's blackish in color like your main div. It will feel more like an app then. TO ME!

Hope this helps. Congrats! A good idea and a lot of work. Very promising.

p.s. - All my input from web app on chrome browser.

plamb9• 15 years ago

Great feedback, I like some of these ideas thanks codeslush!

mapster• 15 years ago

Super. Great content. A map tweak: plug in new coordinates for some of the cities (i.e Boston and NY). When I zoomed to 2nd level it placed me in an irrelevant part of town, or toward the outskirts.

Ideally when user sees map and zooms to street level the end result would be 'in the middle of the action' so to speak.

goo• 15 years ago

My perspective, mostly on UX issues:

The splash page has weird workflow- the only way to go somewhere is by clicking on the tiny red dot and then clicking the button. At the very least increase the click radius for the red button, ideally add an on hover that shows where is (eg San Francisco) and have the button click take them there.. Also, clicking on the states feels like it should do something, since the cursor is the "pointer hand" but it does nothing except change the location hash and make it harder for me to click the back button.

As for the bar view- graceful loading of page elements would be a big help. It took more than 6 seconds for me to load the content on first load, and it takes a fair amount of time to load between the tabs. I suggest some sort of spinny thing that acknowledges the waiting process as something to help stop me from closing the tab right then and there.

(I just took a look at what's making it so slow- it looks like you're pulling down >50 tiny individual pngs- you should probably squish that into a much smaller number of sprites, also same goes for putting all your jquery stuff into one file)

That's really what strikes me most about it right now- usually if a page doesn't load within a second or so for me, you're going to have a hard time convincing me to come back to it, and it would be a shame if all the work you have clearly put into a decent idea is negated by a slow ui.

plamb9• 15 years ago

Thank you goo-- we've had a number of complaints about the speed of the web app and we're definitely focused on speeding that up. What has been holding back that development is that all the buzz we've gotten thus far has been around the mobile apps, so we've been working on making those valuable and bug free. We will be moving up the priority of speeding up the web app.

Spreading our focus across three products and 50 cities so early on was probably a mistake, but we will make up for it.

bricestacey• 15 years ago

It looks neat, but it's practically unusable for me. It's very choppy on OSX10.6 and Chrome 10.0.648.133 beta.

plamb9• 15 years ago

We just got a nice little Mac Mini so we will be testing/fixing the bugs on OSX.

SoWink• 15 years ago

Good concept, except the webpage loads very slowly for me.

plamb9• 15 years ago

Hi SoWink, what OS/Browser are you using?

Ask HN: Critique my Startup BarBird

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