Doko Maps: Share your favorite places

[jdourlens]

Hello everyone,

While living abroad in Japan I always had family and friends asking for recommendations on where and what to visit when they went to Japan. As I was tired of always writing the same list over email, chat, phone... I decided to create a tool to easily map my recommendations and share it for free.
The result is https://dokomaps.com
What is nice compared to other similar services is that on DokoMaps you can also browse created by other travelers to inspire your next travel.
Example of a map: My map of California
Example of a country recommendation: Japan

Let me know if you have any feedback.

You can also learn how to create a map in our tutorial.

 

[Dynamic]

Cool concept! I've thought about building something similar in the past but never got around to it 😅

Here are some of my thoughts:

Reduce whitespace
On the landing page you have a few small paragraphs with artwork which is nice but I feel like there is too much whitespace and it makes the page look at bit empty. I would try adding things like "Featured places", "Most popular", "Newest lists" and such to engage with users quicker.

Add filters
Currently on content pages there is no way to filter lists. I would add a sidebar with some filters for things like Restaurants, Museums, etc...

Design!
You have some nice pictures for the countries on the homepage, why not use some of that in the country pages themselves? I would put a nice big header section with the country's picture as the background to break from all the white. Same treatment for cities.

 

[jdourlens]

Thanks for your quality feedback Dynamic.

Our landing page aimed for converting people to create their own list but this actually does not work really well and you are right that we should add more content to get people curious and explore the other pages.

The search/filters is coming, we'll are making a search directly ina map to let people explore visually.

Thank you for your awesome feedback, I'll update the post when we have some more changes later this week.

 

[jdourlens]

Today we added content to the landing page, and added some fun design to the login/register page ;)

 

[Adam]

This is a cool idea! I really like it and have some ideas to use it for myself. One thing I would say is that landing on the homepage I’m not really sure what it is. Thankfully I saw your examples and post first. I think the site would really benefit from a hero section with a screenshot/demo and a few lines about what it is and what if an be used for.

 

[jdourlens]

This is a cool idea! I really like it and have some ideas to use it for myself. One thing I would say is that landing on the homepage I’m not really sure what it is. Thankfully I saw your examples and post first. I think the site would really benefit from a hero section with a screenshot/demo and a few lines about what it is and what if an be used for.

Thanks for your feedback Adam, explaining what it is without forcing the user into one category is hard as we had map of the best bouldering places or tech scene in a city.
Also we're not native english and I feel we are always using the same words to describe the product. Do you have any ideas on hero section wording we could use?