MizPee (mizpee.com/mizpee/Mainmenu.do) is a new mobile site that aims to help you find a place to go when you gotta go. The premise is simple, enter an address and MizPee will find the nearest public restroom. Toilets are user rated from 1-5, represented not by stars but by toilet paper roll icons. Hours are listed along with whether there is handicapped access, a baby changing table or a charge for using the loo. Listings are currently limited to New York, Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Atlanta, Seattle ,Oakland and San Jose.

The mobile site is easy to use when finding a toilet. Of course it would be nice if it were GPS enabled but that is impossible without carrier cooperation which seems to be unobtainable for a mobile web app like MizPee.

It looks like toilet locations are submitted by users, an Add a Toilet link is prominently featured on most pages. I didn’t find it very easy to add a toilet using a phone. There are a lot of fields; 14 long drop downs for specifying the opening and closing times for each day of the week plus fields for address, rating, comments, etc. That’s a lot to ask users to key on the mobile. The add a toilet page was too large to load in the built-in Openwave V7 browser on my Motorola i855. I can use it on Opera Mini but the submit form needs to be pared down for mobile use. One thing that would help both usability and page size would be to use text fields for entering hours of operation. The text fields should have style=’-wap-input-format: “NN”‘ to switch the mobile keypad to numeric mode. It’s also not possible to add a toilet from MizPee’s PC web page but it should be.

MizPee is a great concept, a perfect use for the mobile web. Right now it doesn’t cover many cities or have a lot of listings. Making it easier to add a listing go a long way in helping this site achieve its potential.

Via: Daily Candy