I’ve been clicking around on the map recently, looking for nice Couchers to reach out to in the UK. It began to feel like the vast majority haven’t “said anything about themselves yet”. So I began a little survey to see.
Note: I couldn’t do the whole country unfortunately, because of the way the zoom works with the numbers of people registered within a specific region, but here’s the one’s I could do. I tried as best I could to count them accurately, but may have missed a couple here or there. Same applies for the total numbers of registered users for a region, which may also have changed by the time you’ve read this. Anyway, you’ll get the general idea:
Scotland, UK.
Registered Users: ~76
Dead profiles: ~43 (56%)
Wales, UK
Registered Users: ~20
Dead profiles: ~13 (65%)
Norfolk, England, UK
Registered Users: ~9
Dead profiles: ~8 (89%)
South West England, UK
Registered Users: ~19
Dead profiles: ~11 (58%)
Trafalgar Square, London, England, UK
Registered Users: ~110
Dead profiles: ~94 (85%)
My point is that from a fairly random sample of registrants in the UK, it is plain to see that the vast majority of these accounts are inactive and have no zero profile information.
Why I think this is a problem:
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It does not make for excellent user experience, as it clutters the map, making searching less enjoyable (does anyone else have any experience of this?), forcing users to click/tap more to find active users (see below).
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A project built by the community for the benefit of the community needs a sense of itself. Who’s in? Who’s involved? Who’s doing things? Who wants to be a part of it? At the moment, trying to find active users in the UK (and I suspect in other countries too), is a bit like turning up to a huge party, wearing a great costume and a shopping trolley full of snacks, only to find out that most of the guest are mannequins.
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Dead profiles are dead. This is a project about aliveness. Whenever I see a dead profile everything feels a little heavier, a little less alive. I waste time thinking, ‘why bother?’. This is probably not a good feeling to give users so early on in a project.
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It possibly presents a false picture of Coucher’s active users:
- If we add up all my above data, I counted 234 users of which 169 (72%) are dead profiles.
- If we take the Couchers map at face value (on the 22nd May, 2022), then we know that there’s 714 Couchers registrants in the UK.
- If ~72% of these are dead, then ~28% (200) are active.
*28% means roughly 1 in every 4 clicks should reveal an active user profile. In my experience, this is far from accurate. For example, I just did a random sample of the Greater Manchester area and it took 6 clicks to reveal an active profile.
If we apply this 28% worldwide, then of the purported 13,727 members, just ~3843 are active, or have at least filled out their profiles to some extent.
Some solutions to stop the clutter:
- Better onboarding. Get people to fill out their profiles immediately. Find creative ways to encourage participation.
- Timb bomb. Users are reminded to fill in their profiles, even just a little, or their accounts will be deleted. Then actually delete them. There is no good reason to keep profiles that haven’t been filled in after a month or two. Delete them. Release their usernames back into the useable pool. It will make the project better for every active user.
- Filters. Allow active users to turn off inactive accounts when searching. (I appreciate that the “last active” filter can help to a degree, but it doesn’t differentiate between users with profiles who haven’t logged in for a while and users with dead profiles who signed up yesterday.)
Personal notes:
- I don’t actually care about quantity, I just want to easily find amazing people to hang out with and visit.
- In the long run, quality is everything. It’s still early days for the platform. If it gains a reputation as the place where you are most likely to find good people (because pretty well everyone has filled out their profile), it will encourage people to sign up and will encourage people to fill out their profiles too, I think.