First impressions of the ‘new’ Qype center on the visual changes on the site. Instead of the familiar olive and orange color scheme, the page is predominantly in bright red, blue and grey. Further there is a new logo and slogan. As explained by Community Manager Stephan ‘Moe’ Mosel in a blog post, the new slogan “Entdecken, Empfehlen” [en=Discover, recommend] (previously “Das Beste der Stadt” [en=The best of the city]) should bring home the goal of the site in just two words. The new logo, in handwriting style, is seen to represent the community aspect.

Along with the purely aesthetic changes, the website displays a completely reworked structure and several new functions. For example the central tab menu (formerly places, Guides, Groups, etc.) has disappeared. In its place, the horizontal navigation bar now displays special categories such as “Eating and Drinking”, “Shopping”, or “Nightlife”. As a result, the Search function now has become more prominent. The new trick is that users can now self configure this navigation bar: under “Alles” [en=all] you can find many categories to choose from. The links to Guides, Groups and People are now found to the right, below this nav bar, in the new module “Mein Verlauf” [en=my progress]. This keeps the user-specific activities clearly separated from the rest of the page.

Further, in another press release, Qype has also concentrated more on the regional aspects of its offering. In the new version, search requests are now possible for specific city parts. This is not fully implemented, at least when we ran our own tests, which were not altogether satisfying.