goldenpages.be
Working at Local Matters I designed the wireframes and interactions of the pages on this belgian yellow page search site, goldenpages.be .
I didn’t do any graphic design on this project, no code, just “interaction design” and “information architecture”.
In general, I’m quite happy with how this site turned out. There are definitely some oddities on the site, like having sort presented as series of tabs on see results page. Nothing fatal, just a little odd.
Great client to work with, one of those easy client relationships. We were able to streamline the home page, down to basically the two what and where search fields.
The internet yellow page business is a little odd. In general, the economics are not well aligned with the users of the site. The advertisers, companies who pay for ads in the printed book or online, fund the site. Oversimplifying a bit, the advertisers would like it to be pay for placement, buy a big ad get listed first in the results. The users want the most relevant results for their query. So the desires of the folks funding the site and not that well aligned with users.
However. This client understands the tradeoffs involved, and the need to please both the advertisers and the users.
Image two, above, shows the province picker. This little widget is hidden by default, but available where ever the search fields are shown. It helps the user pick a province to search.
You can hover in front of a province name to see it highlighted on the map, and the reverse also works. Clicking the map or name ads it to the “where” field. A nice little detail we added.