Show HN: Civic – Online Hub for Causes
Hmm, maybe it&#x27;s worth stealing a few UX ideas from Meetup? Your site is civics-focused (which is really cool), but otherwise it&#x27;s a pretty standard events platform, and there&#x27;s a lot of design and research that went into the other ones. Specifically:<p>1) The map takes up a lot of screen space but that&#x27;s arguably not what is most important in this context. If you live in NYC, I would expect that getting around isn&#x27;t going to be the make-or-break factor of whether you&#x27;re going to an event. Meetup doesn&#x27;t even have a map, and Yelp has a small overview map; both let the actual listings take up most of the space, because that&#x27;s what people are looking for (interesting events, not primarily the closest one by 0.5 miles)<p>2) Allow people to browse not just events but also groups (associated nonprofits), along with a brief description for each and a &quot;learn more&quot; link. Maybe even some brief metadata (# of members, # of events hosted in the last 3 months, maybe even user reviews...)<p>3) You talked about the onboarding process in the works. Meetup is pretty good at that, allowing you to select multiple interests (tags) and showing you only the relevant stuff.<p>4) Being able to subscribe to tags and&#x2F;or groups would be awesome. Most users probably would only care about a few groups, not all the events happening around them<p>5) Your filters are a bit confusing. What is the difference between Government, Voting, Campaigns, and Demonstrations...? Maybe more useful categories would be things like &quot;Public Meeting&quot;, &quot;Protest&quot;, &quot;Community Gardens&quot;, &quot;Arts &amp; Crafts&quot;, &quot;Food Kitchens&quot;, etc... like the specific activities people can engage in, as opposed to making people try to guess whether an event is more &quot;Campaigns&quot; or &quot;Voting&quot;. I think breaking down &quot;politics&quot; into specific subcategories is something that people in the field (on the hill&#x2F;work for a politician) might do, but to the general public, being able to (for example) separate thanksgiving help at the soup kitchen vs chalking for a politician is probably more useful.<p>6) For the search bar, also allow broader searches (&quot;protests&quot;) and suggest them in the placeholder and autocomplete. Searching by exact event name is useless because there&#x27;s no way people would know what nonprofits call their events.<p>7) Have some measure of popularity or importance, whether it&#x27;s a heatmap or a count of attendees&#x2F;group size, etc. I think the biggest job (and the hardest thing to do) for events sites is dealing with the signal to noise ratio, and presenting the most interesting events -- whether by algorithm or human moderation -- as opposed to a long list of tiny events with like 3-4 people attending that most people won&#x27;t be interested in. The default view of a new user shouldn&#x27;t be, &quot;here&#x27;s 200 things happening in your town, good luck choosing one&quot; but rather something like &quot;here are 3 top picks for today, and 2 more later this week... plus browse by category or popularity&quot;<p>Some other minor stuff: Your images are loading with the wrong aspect ratios. They are being forcibly resized to squares in your popups... it&#x27;s a small thing but has a big visual impact. Your Share button is way more prominent than your View More. Your addresses aren&#x27;t clickable.<p>Overall though, really glad to see this sort of thing springing up. Thanks for building it, and hope it takes off!