buUuk has just added Indonesian and Malaysian cities.

Let us know if your favourite restaurant is listed and if not please ‘Add’ it to buUuk.

Thank you!

If you are using Android.. buUuk is now available as a free download

http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=2297362

enjoy!

Someone asked this question recently in the buUuk forum and I thought is deserved an explanation longer than 140 characters. So here it is….

We’ve had a lot of discussions about restaurant pricing and how to best display it in buUuk. At first we chose to just ignore the issue, but users requested it so often we gave in. Why the reluctance? Well mainly because we weren’t comfortable with the way price is usually displayed in restaurant guides, but we couldn’t think of an alternative. Most guides give a 5 point scale and try to associate a price range with each point on the scale. This has some problems. For example, it’s possible for me and you to dine at the same restaurant at the same time and pay vastly different amounts depending on our choices. Also,  a coffee shop that charges $7 for a coffee could get a 2 on the scale, even though it’s the most expensive coffee shop in the city.

But we all have a sense of value right? So that’s what we’ve tried to build into buUuk. The pricing for a location in buUuk is crowd sourced; users use a slider to set a position along a scale. The scale has no values associated with it. Users can set the slider position wherever they like, for any reasons they choose. We then simply take the input, convert it to a value between 1 and 10 and average it along with all other users’ input. So it’s perfectly valid for a hawker stall that sells the most expensive Wanton Mee in Singapore to have 10 $ symbols for price, if that’s what the average user input is.

So we’re trusting the wisdom of the crowd and removing any of our own subjectivity from the problem. The more users who set price for a location the more useful this data will become. You can set the price on the buUrp screen for any location, just set the slider, you don’t need to add any other information if you don’t want.

Once a price has been set it will show up in the restaurant detail page (see below). Why 10 $ symbols and not 5? We started with 5 but didn’t think it effectively showed up the variance in prices across restaurants.

Short answer to the question “How to Interpret the buUuk Price Range”, whatever way you think best….

Let us know what you think and how we could do this better.