I’m a huge fan of Yelp.com because it allows me to be snarky in reviews, and generally the audience is pretty knowledgable about places. I’m not a fan, though, of their Information Architecture.

What ever you do, make navigation options obvious

It didn’t occur to me until a year and a half after using the site (really, a year and a half!) that messaging was connecting me to my internal email or in box at Yelp. Now, I’m a fan of cute, and it works on some sites, but not on most, especially a social networking review site. They really need to name it something obvious like InBox or Mail, because users don’t want to have to search for basic functions. It would really nice if there were a constant reminder of how many unread messages I had.

Talk is also a bit esoteric (I would have used Message Board or Forum, and there’s plenty of room).

I wonder how many page views they gave up because Yelp users don’t realize there’s a message board on Yelp?