Show HN: 1MileJobs

HN, I have very much appreciated your feedback on variety of issues. Whether it's bitcoin or flappy bird, I have always come back to HN to gain insightful knowledge from comments. Me and my buddy have been working on a project for a while now. It's 1milejobs. Our primary audience is people for whom distance to a job location is the deal breaker. These might be either because of commuting costs or young people for whom it's safer to work close to home. Granted, one would be very lucky to find a 60K job within a couple of miles radius, it boils down to mostly low-paying jobs. On the good side, these are commodity jobs that can be produced and consumed by anyone. The website address is http://1milejobs.com and the app's URL is http://1milejobs.com:8080. I appreciate any input I can get. also put up a screenshot video http://youtu.be/rCCb-DwhLPE if you don't have time to signup. Thx.

Also, you might want to edit your post. You have:

http://1milejobs:8080

rather than:

http://1milejobs.com:8080

The first thing I noticed was the use of "mile" in your domain and company name. Using "mile" is problematic since most of the world is on the metric system. I fired up a thesaurus to augment the tiny amount of imagination I have for this kind of thing, but the best suggestions I came up with that weren't already registered were:

No match for "NEIGHBORINGJOBS.COM"

No match for "CLOSEBYJOBS.COM"

Sadly, tons of domains with "jobs" in it are already taken.

Your faq says you've tested with recent browsers, but you need to put some effort into maintaining support for older browsers (yes, I know it's a pain, but such is web development). The following screen shot was done on Firefox 18:

http://www.designtools.org/pix/1milejobs_app.png

It looks a better in chromium 24:

http://www.designtools.org/pix/1milejobs_app_chrome.png

In Chromium, when loading over a slow-ish Internet connection, there's a flash of a set of icons with titles, but they disappear behind the above. I don't want to poke at it, but I'd bet if I toggled visibility, I might find something that you don't want accessible.

For your initial app display, I'd use geo-location to get the general location of the visitor, and display a few listings from that area, even a wider area than one mile if need be.

It's an interesting concept. Good Luck!

Wow, these are the insights we are looking at.

I like the concept, but the interface is not usable. You chose to try to make it cool instead of usable. Just make it more normal. The kinds of people who will be using your website will not be comfortable with the interface.

Start the app with content first, the first thing I should see is the data on jobs around me that you have. It should try to look up my location using any available APIs. Whether mobile GPS apis, or looking up the location via geoip at the worst. Then, it should let me enter my location for finer grained selection.

If you need data for the jobs you could scrape other websites or something. The user should be able to add jobs too. Start it for free then when your site becomes popular you can charge them to post.

Just because it's called 1 mile jobs doesn't mean you can't have other ranges. Let the user select to expand this.

You will want to look into using a stored procedure for checking the radius against other geolocations. In server side code it will be too slow.

Don't color the radio button in solid black. It just makes it look broken. Use typical and idiomatic colors and patterns that users expect. If you're not a design god, then use a bootstrap 3 or foundation theme.

You need to have hover effects and click effects when a link is engaged. This lets the user know something is clickable. I almost thought I couldn't click your buttons. When I did, the first time I didn't press the mouse hard enough and it made me think it wasn't even a working button.

The text is too close to the icons on the bottom. It is hard to look at.

TIL: Cookies are retained across ports, I never even thought about it before.

Oh yeah, awesome concept (the 1milejobs thing).