What is the purpose of the "Services near me" button on the homepage?

[declan]

Is there a reason not to make the search default to using the user's location? If there isn't, then it seems the "Services near me" button adds another UI element without providing a lot of additional functionality or value.

[anselmbradford]

The thinking behind keeping them separate is:

• Accepting geolocation is an end user action, so browsers present a (sometimes scarily worded) alert for users to allow or deny sharing their location, such as this:

  This presents a couple issues, though not insurmountable:

  1. On visiting the site for the first time, the user needs to perform two clicks (search and then deal with geolocation alert) to get to the results page at all.
  2. The user may deny sharing their location, which means the search has to have logic to handle when that happens (presently an alert is shown, but if geolocation was integrated into the main search button it should probably fall back to going to the search results without geolocation enabled—e.g. the current behavior).

• The use case for an ohana-web-search app (at least originally) is a relatively confined geographic area, with a relatively small dataset, so for an initial visit it was preferable to guide the user to getting more results and narrowing down than to narrow down to their location immediately (unless they opted to do that through the "Services near me" button).

What do you think? Anything I'm missing here?

[anselmbradford]

There's also an argument to be made for removing the homepage altogether and have the all results search results page be the default homepage, and then automatically request the user's location when they first visit. Like what the CfA Brigade page does: http://codeforamerica.org/brigade/. I'm mixed on an approach that removes the current homepage, as that's a place to minimize information overload so that the "about" and other extraneous areas of the site stand out better on first visit. However, the approach of requesting the user's location immediately on first visit is a possibility.

[declan]

Sure, that makes sense to not want to ask the user for a location before they've seen some usefulness in the site. I guess the other approach would be to use a gem like GeoIP, which lets you geolocate based on the user's IP. I believe the free level of service will get you the city, but nothing more precise than that.

That might not make sense if you can assume the user is in San Mateo, but I know you guys are planning to expand within the Bay area (or have already?). In that case it might help to filter by city even before prompting the user for a location.

The only reason I brought this up was because I was finding it confusing to have two search buttons that did almost but not quite the same thing, and I was wondering if there were any way to simplify the UI. It sounds like you've thought this through, though, so feel free to close the issue unless you want to make it a priority to improve.

[anselmbradford]

Here's how OECD handles it --> http://oecdregionalwellbeing.org/ ... not sure I like the very intrusive UI.

[declan]

Yeah the OECD site seems a little invasive.

[declan]

If anything I would be in favor of fewer options on the homepage, rather than more. Like take the "services near me" button off the home page and only have it in the sidebar of the results page. Also, the new sidebar makes it way easier to just enter a zipcode, which (maybe) removes some of the necessity for "services near me".

How often is "services near me" clicked on in smc-connect.org?

[declan]

In Purple Binder we have a concept of a "default location", basically downtown Chicago, which we use until the user supplies one. Do you think that makes sense in the context of Ohana?

[anselmbradford]

We kind of have a default location in that the dataset is geographically rather confined, though larger than downtown Chicago. A really unfortunate UX thing with the map is headquarters for hotlines that are across the country. I was thinking of whether there should an algorithm in the map that excluded outliers from the map bounds calculation when first loading the map, but another approach would be to have a default location so the results are geographically contained. I'm not sure of the performance implications for necessitating a geographic search every time.

In regard to the services near me, this sounds like a good candidate for #483. I'm not sure that we'd want to eliminate it entirely, but having the option to include/exclude it on the homepage and/or the inside page seems like a reasonable customization request.

@monfresh can correct me if I'm wrong but we don't have analytics tracking set up on the geolocation button click like we do the homepage links, but that's not a bad idea to include that.

EDIT: "like we do the homepage links"

[declan]

Going to close this for now, doesn't seem like a high priority.