To help even more in the restaurant decision making process, we’ve added some Fun, but Optional survey questions to the review form to help users express even more information about their dining experience. Right now, we’ve got 3 questions around the areas of ambience, cost, and service. However, instead of taking the rating or score approach, we decided to phrase the questions in survey form – all you have to do it pick an answer. Here are the current questions and answers, along with a screenshot of the new form:

• Ambience: I came here for
  • a business meeting – more professional setting, somewhere you can talk and look respectable
  • a romantic date – a little on the quieter side with a more intimate setting
  • a family meal – pretty casual and you can bring your kids
  • fun with friends – a lively atmosphere that’s more accomodating to larger and louder groups
  • a meal on the go – not much of a dining atmosphere, either you come here just to eat or you get it to go
• Cost: My share of the meal was
  • Less than $10
  • Between $10 and $25
  • Between $25 and $50
  • More than $50
• Service: I tipped (or would have)
  • Less than 15% – subpar
  • Between 15% and 18% - average
  • More than 18% – better than expected

While the bucketed answers constrain you a little in choice, they offer a more descriptive answer than “Ambience:4 stars” or “Cost:5 stars” because those ratings are subjective. I might think $15 dollars deserves 5 stars for cost while someone else might think it’s 1 star.

Hopefully this additional information helps you both describe your experience more accurately and decide which places suit your needs. Let us know if you have any other ideas to improve the decision making process.

- Justin

Now that we’ve gotten this blog up it’s time to put it to good use. Today we did a first pass at all your wonderful feedback and fixed a number of nagging issues. I won’t list all of them here, but there are two that are worth mentioning (and trying out):

1. streamlining menu item adding. we’ve smoothed out the menu item addition form, so it’s much easier to add a single dish to a menu (or even multiple in succession).
2. restaurant pages now show existing reviews when there are no items on the menu, so there’s something to see. (we’d love your opinion on this behavior – see the end of this post)

Big thanks to bluerhapsodies, liksani, jetleigh, chilumba, rags, jdogg, and billyd94 for bringing these and the other issues we fixed to our attention! If you’ve sent feedback, don’t worry, we’ll definitely get to it. =)

I’ve also noticed that some users are using the Gravatar system with their user accounts – they look awesome, and really brighten up the reviews. If you haven’t tried it out, I’d encourage you to check out Gravatar when you get the chance.

So regarding the #2 fix above: which do you prefer to see first on a restaurant page: the menu or the reviews? We’re torn on this and we’d like to know what you think.

That’s all for now. Keep up the great usage and feedback!

-John