1) I agree the map takes up a lot screen space. Maybe do something like Yelp, where there are alternative views for map of events vs. events list.
2) In addition to allowing browsing specific events and groups.
5) Definitely agree with the current filters being confusing. Maybe a tagging system with a curated set of tags instead or in parallel to the categories might be better, to allow multiple tags per event. I also think having a very granular filtering system with a lot more filter options for things like number of attendees, number of shares, etc. could be important to users.
7) Agreed that making a recommendation system that's able to indicate popularity/importance/significance is a big, hard problem, but that it also could be a very attractive feature to users. Possibly you could have registered organizations "vote" to support other organization's events as one factor - it would help with spam and noise filtering.
Also, it would be good to have a policy statement about how you will handle controversy about events and organizations.
I really like the overall concept, and wish you luck!
One quick follow-up for #1, I wonder if a political boundaries layer would be helpful? Like districts for state/federal House, or local government divisions. When I lived in Chicago, being able to filter by ward would've been great. It's only gonna get more confusing as gerrymandering increases :)
Best of luck with the project, and thanks again for taking this on!
1) I agree, we're definitely still trying to figure out the best balance between the map and the list view. That being said, we've found that causes are somewhat unique in that, to a lot of people, geography matters more when it comes to civic engagement than it does for other types of events. With that in mind, we're looking to add ways for users to customize their experience as much as possible, i.e. by being able to toggle between a list view and the map, adjust the width of the sidebar, etc.
2) Completely agree.
3) Meetup has a great onboarding process.
4) Fully agree!
5) That's a good point, there are definitely ways to make the filters more intuitive. Appreciate the feedback!
6) Absolutely, the search bar is incredibly basic right now but we figured we'd still get it out there. In the coming weeks, we'll add the ability to search by causes, event types (ie 'protests'), key words, and more.
7) That's a good idea! Definitely agree that a core challenge with an events platform is making it easy for each user to see the most relevant/interesting content, as opposed to showing them everything.
Cheers!