I find the current layout a bit overwhelming and making it difficult to understand which preferences a host actually cares about, or which circumstances they want you to be aware of.
I don’t think it’s helpful that the layout always shows all options and defaults to “No” if no checkmark is set. I think many of the options are only relevant if you have a stated opinion about them. So I’d prefer to choose Yes/No about a preference and then show this preference on my page. But don’t show the options that I didn’t explicitly specify (or worse choose a default answer for me).
I second that. I don’t want to have a definitive y/n for some things (namely kids & pets), but that depends a lot on the circumstances. (Ages of the kid, type of pet and stuff like that.)
Also, if I leave the “max number of guests” on 0 (because that’s another thing that depends…), it defaults to 1. It shouldn’t do that.
Something like “depends - ask anyway”.
Simply adding choices for types of pets or ages for kids wouldn’t solve everything, because for example I can’t host dogs when my roomie (who’s afraid of them) is home, but while he’s away it wouldn’t be a problem.
I think the best way to differentiate is to not display the options that are not set. When browsing the profile, it shows that this preference is not that important to that member or they don’t have a general attitude towards it. And it highlights the preferences they actually care about.
Regards to search filters, I think all three options (yes/no/not specified) can be meaningful. For example I travel with a kid. I’d first look for hosts that express they welcome kids. When I wouldn’t find a host with this filter, I’d consider writing hosts that haven’t specified their preference about kids, but might be a good match for other reasons. But I wouldn’t want to contact members who already put a “No” at Kids Welcome.
We could just not display a preference at all if a person doesn’t select yes or no. We can also omit “last-minute requests” altogether since that will be filter-based anyway (if you enter in a date range that is too soon for the person, their profile will not be displayed).
However, there are some things that would always need to be displayed like:
Maximum number of guests
Wheelchair accessible
Private/shared space (which should be renamed to “sleeping privacy” since that’s what this is actually referring to)
Oh, I also really wanted to write about this! I certainly would like it to have a ‘maybe’ or smth like that option, and not displaying non-specified points could be helpful too.
In particular, I am kinda disturbed by the drinking question. Like I do accept having some wine at my place and will happily take part, but I feel having a Yes for those on my profile could encourage people to come drunk or think heavy drinking at my place is fine (or expect me to be an alcoholic, on the other hand).
I also think parking could be left not specified. Or at least the details of it, and the ‘parking available’ could have an ‘ask me’ option then. For example, at my place it’d depend whether you’re on a car or on a motorcycle, so I don’t know what to answer now.
The original design was to have Yes/No/Sometimes as responses to the drinking question. Not sure why it got implemented as a simple yes/no.
Good call on having the “ask me” option for parking. You can currently select “ask me” for smoking, so I don’t see why we couldn’t do this for parking too.
This might actually need it’s own thread for a discussion about it. I think there are strong opinions both for and against having this. If I remember correctly, there were concerns about this feature helping people who try to use the platform for dating. Likewise, you won’t be able to search for hosts of a particular gender (eg. so men can’t search just for women), but you can search for people of the same gender as you (eg. if you’re a woman and only want to consider other women in your hosting search).
The primary goals of these changes is to improve the experience for women.
Oh. I actually mostly saw it used by girls who only host girls. I guess with that option they wouldn’t be shown in the search for guys at all, so it comes kinda handy and actually helps to improve the experience for women, as you said
I guess it depends on the country a lot. In places like India, Turkey, even South Korea almost all girls had this “girls only” thing
I believe there are also plans to add a “show my profile to women only” option for women. Although this feature won’t be particularly useful until there are more users on the platform
Well, it’s quite a big difference between only hosting women and only showing the profile to women Anyway, maybe I should create a separate topic really
This is how it’s displayed on my page, with drinking being a box to check along with pets, children, etc. Probably it was supposed to be put like smoking?
Three forms of consumption that can be prevalent and that people tend to care about are:
smoking
drinking
drugs
Obviously the legality and prevalence of drug use (i.e. drugs other than smoking & alcohol) is dependent on the country/region/city. Since drug use is pretty infrequent (in most places for most people), I think the benefit of adding a feature to let people indicate their drug use (or marijuana use) probably does not outweigh the potential risks (privacy, legal, etc). And although edibles are a thing, smoking does cover a portion of marijuana consumption anyway. Keep in mind that people can (and often do) indicate any drugs they are into somewhere on their profile (eg: hinting at being “420 friendly” or mentioning how psychedelics have helped expand their mind, etc).
i don’t think i would want to mark on my profile as “i use drugs” even though it is written under Interests or elsewhere on my profile that i use some drugs, i had some problems with this on Airbnb (listing my place as 420 friendly in the title) with junkies booking my place, who shot up at my place (not that i knew it at the time but i found used needles in the room they were in after they left) and also getting heroin users who although didn’t do drugs at my place but recommended to me i should use heroin :Þ
anyways, Airbnb is ofcourse alot different than CS or Couchers and i’ve never had such experiences in all my years on CS but i still think it sends the wrong message to write in some checkbox that drugs are being used
I’d say, drug use is still a criminal offense in many places of the world. Probably not a good idea to make it seem couchers are encouraging it by having that option
Could it be possible to opt out of this preference list? It just seems too much and not very ‘easy going’, some of them are privacy breaches, others just pointless.
Thanks for the insight into the drug use questions, that is definitely a much better approach to cover it in the text of the profile.
All topics can be covered in the profile itself, but the intention of separate fields will be to allow users to filter on those values, or to highlight those items as quick important facts to qualify - or disqualify - a potential host. It might be good to define which fields are used for each of those two purposes.
