As you've probably noticed, we've been rolling out a new design over the past few weeks. Now that it's been implemented nearly everywhere, we'd like to show off some of the changes, some obvious and others a bit less so.
Cleaner Layout
As Urbanspoon has grown, so has the amount of reviews, photos, menu items, tweets, reservation times, and other information on our restaurant listings. The challenge is to present this ever-expanding content in a way that's useful and not overwhelming.
To help achieve this, we eliminated one of the three vertical columns for the restaurant listings, making the main column wider and the page cleaner and easier to read. We combined all of the essential restaurant info (such as the address/phone, cuisine type, schedule, and menus) into one section at the top of the listing, and now include bigger and more recent photos on the listing page. We improved download times for restaurant listings, and instituted a maximum visible length for diner reviews (click "more" to see the rest).
More Specific Searching
On the City and Neighborhood pages, we centralized all of the browsing options and improved our filtering to let you select multiple categories. Looking for a modern American restaurant with outdoor dining where you can book a table online tonight? A moderately-priced, kid-friendly Mexican restaurant in your neighborhood?
Select the cuisine and features you're interested in and we'll show you a list of restaurants that match your criteria (and how you've voted on those restaurants in the past). You can also see a selection of recent user, critic, and blogger reviews for those restaurants in the right sidebar. Visit an old favorite or take a chance on a new place – we'll give you all the info you need to decide.
Reduced Spamminess
You may have noticed that the number of "kudos" has recently decreased across Urbanspoon. (Kudos tell you how many people have recommended a diner's review.) That's because we've decided to only allow kudos from registered users, and removed all existing kudos from unregistered users. We did this to keep Urbanspoon trustworthy and eliminate ballot stuffing (like 73 people recommending the review "I like the fries"). We're also continuously revising our fraud detection features and relevance sorting to make sure you see the most legitimate and helpful reviews first.
Urbanspoon always has been and always will be an ever-evolving site, and while we're pretty proud of what we've done, we're always looking for the next improvement. To that end, we've also done a lot of work on the back-end to make it easier and quicker for us to make changes to our code. If you have any suggestions, please drop us a line using the feedback link at the bottom of every Urbanspoon page.
Source: http://www.urbanspoon.com/blog/64/Welcome-to-the-New-Urbanspoon.html
