The test version of our restaurant guide blows, which you probably already know if you read my last post. In the course of combing through all of the comments made by our testers, we had a long talk about what to do with this little conundrum and a couple of crappy ideas were tossed around. How are we supposed to create a true “restaurant guide” when we have a limited amount of editorial content on hand and no money to pay for a bunch more?
We hemmed and hawed, and then our engineer Patrick came up with a pretty sweet solution: a Top 10 list based on user votes! It’s perfect. It addresses the near-unanimous feedback that we need to give users restaurant suggestions and reviews, it’s consistent with our user-generated-content model, and it’s something that has the potential to be different every day. It may take some time for voting to cause daily changes, but it’ll happen eventually. Plus, we already have the voting structure in place, so it’s a no-brainer.
We already have a Weekly Editorial Review, local reviews (the engine for the Top 10), and the ability to let people browse restaurants by name or by cuisine type. Throw in the Top 10 as the main attraction among these other features and, voila, we have a Restaurant Guide. Granted, it’s not the perfect RG, but it’s the best we can do right now and I think it’ll go over well with the general public.
One other problem that requires major fixing is our homepage which, as of this moment, is horrendously bad. A redesign has already been laid out and just needs to be built - it’s waaaaaaaaaaay better. Pretty much the same info as the current version, but much prettier and one (small) additional feature is going to be added as a result.
There’s still more test feedback to go through, but so far we’ve done a pretty good job of taking the test results to heart and a lot of progress has been made on improving the things our testers have pointed out. Now if we go back for a second round of feedback and they all say that the Homepage and RG still look like crap, then we’re gonna be in trouble! But that won’t happen because I’ll beat our test group senseless before they can get a negative word out, and they know it. 
