foodha for thought - menuism blog

Some of you might have noticed that things look pretty different on Menuism. We’ve been listening hard to your feedback and decided to give the site a facelift for the better. Menuism is all about helping you eat better, and one of the biggest goals of the update was to give a lot more focus to users and how they related to each other and the restaurants they dine at. Here’s a quick tour:

• Left Context / Action / Menu Bar
  • The top part of the left menu column is the context data. On a city, user, or restaurant’s page, you can expect to see a snapshot of relevant information here.
  • Right under the pages that have a context box, there might be an action button section. These are the important actions you can take on that page. If you don’t know what to do, look there.
  • The Menu Bar has a bunch of colored tabs that show you what kind of content is available to you.
• Header
  • We tried to clean up the header a little bit and make search a little more straight-forward. You can easily hit the restaurant, food, and user search from the top.
  • On the top right, you’ll always have quick access to your home, try list and settings. When in doubt, just click on your own pretty picture!
• Content
  • The content is a bit more organized now. You’ll notice that things are more contained and many of the boxes have a link on the top right to either go to a more detailed page or take action.

This is only the start. There will be more changes and optimizations rolled out, but we wanted to get the basic layout change out so everyone could start playing with it. If you’ve got feedback or more ideas, let us know!

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements.

-Justin & John

It’s been quiet on this blog lately, but for good reason – we’ve been hard at work making small (and not-so-small) changes all over the site. Many of these changes come directly from your feedback, so thank you, and keep it coming!

Reviews

• Wrote a review, but made a typo? You can now edit the text bodies of your reviews and accompanying menu item reviews. Just go to your reviews list on your user homepage and click on the offending block of text to make your fix.
• While you’re looking at all your beautiful reviews, you might notice that they’re now sortable by the most recent reply – this makes it easy to quickly respond to the whims of your adoring fans.

Users

• User search: we’ve added a simple user search capability to the site. Just click on the checkbox in the search header to find a user, and enter their screen name or first name. Enter their city and state, or leave the location box blank to search across the whole site. Now it’s super easy to find your friends and favorite reviewers!
• Profile customization: show the world who you are! On your user homepage you can now add a custom tagline, website url and personal description which are visible to all users. I challenge you to come up with a better tagline than Justin’s – “living to eat is much more fun”.

Invites

• It’s great to see that people are using the invite feature to share the site with their friends, but the feedback loop wasn’t fully complete, until now. Now when the friends you invite join the site, two things happen:
  1. You get an confirmation email with the great news.
  2. Your friend automatically becomes your fan (on the site). Who wouldn’t be a fan of your beautiful self?

Design

• New front page: what do you think? We pulled out the user lists to better recognize both the best tippers and reviewers and rearranged things to increase the educational effectiveness of the page.
• New restaurant pages: we hope the smoother layout and new nifty little graphics help you navigate the restaurant pages more easily. Writing a review and voting for the menu usefulness has never been easier!

In addition to these features we’ve also made a lot of under-the-cover changes and fixes to keep things running quickly and smoothly for your food-finding enjoyment. Let us know what you think of the changes, and keep spreading the word!

-John

p.s. If you’re curious about the other thing that’s kept us busy lately, you can read about it on our business blog.

Invitations

If you’ve been visiting the site regularly you might have noticed a few changes, the biggest of which being the open invitations. If you have an account on the site you can now invite friends by going to your home page and entering their emails into the invitation form. Before we send the email you’ll get a chance to customize the email message. Do you have a friend that really knows good food? Invite them and add them as a friend and you’ll start get recommendations based on their actions. Build your network of trusted friends with similar taste and never go hungry again! (bold claim huh?)

Frontpage

As you may have noticed, our design is ever involving. Currently we’re focusing on the front page. We’re shooting for a blend of education and content. Let us know what you think and if you have any suggestions.

Growth

As we start to open up little by little and refine the site it’s been a real joy to see users coming back to use the site and new users joining. Sure, there’s only a few of us on the site now but it just makes it a more tightly-knit community. We even had our first user to hit 100 tips received! Here are some of the top users (as of mid-day Sept 13):

• tulips500 – 102 tips received
• fattiusthebear – 88 tips received
• jetleigh – 80 tips received
• turtley – 59 tips received
• jdogg – 58 tips received
• foodbuddha – 48 tips received
• takeru – 45 tips received
• bonus_mop – 35 tips received

These users have written many great reviews that have been recognized with tips from other users. Just for fun, when you go to your homepage you’ll see your top 3 tippers.

Thanks to everyone that’s been so great about contributing reviews and especially those menus – it’s really helping the site take shape!

Keep sending feedback and we’ll keep working to please you.

Justin