Great idea, but I agree, their user interface sucks. (Which is unfortunate, since it’s a super simple app that is pretty much only a user interface!)

Thanks for the writeup! I was part of the team that wrote meetinbetween.us. We appreciate your opinions, and we are actively working on improving the site. I agree that the permalink for the map could be a little more obvious.

@Ryan: I’d be interested to know what it is about the user interface that “sucks”? Can you give any specific things you didn’t like?

- Joe

Hi Joe. Thanks for the app. It has already been useful to me.
My two pain points were the permalink and also the adding of addresses. After I added the first one it may be nice at that point to have another button to find places, cause first time after adding the second address I was a bit confused and thought it didn’t work till I noticed the big button next to the additional address field.

I don’t think the interface sucks, but some things are not that apparent and it may be more of the colors as everything blends in with the blue. I’m not entirely sure but I like the app overall.

@Joe you should display two text boxes, one on top of the other for each of the two addresses, with a “Meet Us In Between” button in between the two text fields.

Do you have the ability to do more than two addresses (say, triangulate between three or more addresses)? If so, awesome feature, but the above layout would not work.

You should still display two text boxes as blocks, then a little “add another address” hyperlink below them, and lastly a big “Meet Us In Between” button on the bottom of the form.

Like This: http://plasticvicar.com/drop/muib.png

Or this: http://plasticvicar.com/drop/muib2.png

@ryan – thanks for the input. Yes, it does take more than two addresses at this point. I believe we set it up the way we did so as not to crowd up the screen if someone has ~20 addresses. I will definitely take your concerns to our usability engineer.

I like the 2nd screen shot. That seems to make sense. No real need for the map, except to make it look cool. On the hompage at least. Allows for 3 less clicks and get you right to the meat.

Hi Ryan & Chris, I was also a member of the team that launched the site, thanks for the great feedback.

@Ryan, on the 2 address boxes – we’ve heard a few people confused by the address entry, especially people not knowing that you could add more than 2 addresses. We are working on our next release and will hopefully be able to come up with a more workable solution.

@Chris, I will talk to the team about the permalink and colors. We hope to be able to expand the “Share This Map” functionality soon to be more than just copying a link – hopefully as we add features things will stand out more.

Thanks again,
-Andrew Kavanaugh

Had to chk this out after reviewing all of the comments.

Admittedly, even after reading the comments, I was still a little confused when I first accessed the site. I think it’s because I made the mistake of looking @ Ryan’s sample UI – his UI made sense to me.

With a name like “Meet In Between Us” I had assumed that a user would be able to plot 2 points (between = 2; among = more than 2), but I understand the reasoning after reading Joe’s comments about cluttering up the screen

BTW – When I entered my home address into the text box on meetinbetween.us, there was no visible error or msg, but Firebug returned:

GLatLng is null
http://meetinbetween.us/javascripts/map.observers.js?1224636746
Line 65

About 6 months ago, my home address disappeared from google maps – I’m sure that’s the reason for the error, but it would be great to tell the end user to pick a different address.

I’d wager that 80% of your users are going to only going to use two addresses, so I think you should cater the UI to them.

Adding some graphics like a nice big [+] button next to the “Add another address” will pull the user’s attention, especially if they have to move their mouse through that area to get to the “Meet in between us” button.

I also agree with @chris, there’s no need for the map on the home page, especially because I originally thought I was supposed to click my location on the map, rather than enter it in the text box. Perhaps instead of a live google map on the home page, you could have an image of two locations and the in-between — graphically showing the user how the app works. You’d just have to make it obvious that it wasn’t a live map. Perhaps rotate the image a bit and add a curled edge and drop shadow effect

Great idea, it was fun to try out. Certainly gives a new perspective on what’s half-way. For example, I was surprised at the results comparing the Upper Cape to downtown Boston, further South than I would have thought.

I did find that dragging the map around resulted in a return to the home page, which was unexpected. I was using Chrome, running under XP.

It would be nice to have persistence in the address box, or perhaps an option “Save this address?”

Had to laugh at the inclusion of “Apple Store” in the location option!

What if the folks meeting both have cabins out in the forest? Won’t the “Big Maple Tree” suggestion become somewhat confusing?