Zagat.com Redesign Follies

They've launched a redesigned Zagat.com and, at least for how I use it, they've ruined the site. I grant that this is related to the unique circumstances of where I live, which is in the northern suburbs of NYC (Westchester County). Bear with me here, because this problem is probably more related to the local geography than anything else, but it's annoying nonetheless.

When Zagat publishes their print guides, they publish a NYC edition (of course) and a separate "Southern NY and Connecticut" edition. The latter is the one I use. Under their old site design, one could choose their location based on the print editions that were available. For me, perfect. I was able to search for restaurants here in Westchester (and there are quite a few good ones) without having to wade through all the thousands of listings for the NYC edition.

I'm sure someone at Zagat decided it would be better if users could create their own "locations." Therefore, you can now go to the site and put in an actual street address (say, your home) and then set a radius (5 mi., 10 mi., 50 mi., etc.) for your search. In the abstract, that was probably a good idea. The bad idea was taking away the ability to set your location based on the print edition of Zagat altogether. There's a reason why the print editions are segragated the way they are, and not making them available as "locations" on the website was a huge mistake.

With the new design, the best I can do is set a radius around my house, which invariably, is way too small. Or if I try to make it bigger to include most of Westchester, then I'm finding restaurants in NYC (if I want to go into the city, I'll seach for a city restaurant, thank you) or even Long Island (um, I'm not going across the Whitestone Bridge for a burger, thank you again).

This doesn't make sense at all, and it's a tirumphant failure of a "neat functionality idea" winning out over common sense. If anyone from Zagat.com is reading this, please give me back the ability to set "Southern NY State" as my location, and then I'll stop whining.

Comments

[rh]

Hmm.

http://www.zagat.com/verticals/LocationSelect.aspx?N=120&Ne=119&VID=8

"Browse Our Locations OR Enter Street Address"

I guess it's fixed now, that was quick! Or they just put the radius method online a day before the other one for some weird reason.

[Deb Morrissey]

Uh, no. The "browse our locations" option does not allow the Southern NY choice. You can choose the entire NYC metro area, or a specific borough, or a specific Westchester town, or all of New York State, but not all of the southern NY/Western Conn area without including NYC.

[Melissa]

But the contemporary New Atheism peomonhnen can be studied without really caring about what new atheists believe since the movement largely defines itself as opposing the status quo – i.e. it’s easily show how religion is bad, without proposing an alternative. Clearly this isn’t a long term solution and eventually we will need to propose a replacement for religion, but for now, the movement should be studied for what it is. No replacement is necessary. I think of religion as a bad habit like any other. When you can see clearly that religion is false and undesirable, nothing need replace it. To say that it requires a replacement is like saying that people who bite their nails need something to replace biting their nails. No they don't. They just need to stop biting their nails.