The New Desktop Homepage

[Jamie763]

The new desktop homepage, while it looks pretty, is confusing, disorganized, and absolute trash. I loved being able to see a stats breakdown on the homepage and the sidebar with notifications. It's motivating, a great snapshot of your month and other performance indicators, was generally nice to see as one of the top items on the page. Now it takes 3 clicks and associated load times just to see your overall rating. 

Changing the Performance tab to Insights is just plain stupid. Was there a dictionary or thesaurus available in the UI/UX department? You gain insight from studying your performance metrics, so it really makes no sense to change the category to insights.

Most of all, the upcoming/current reservations list was organized easy to read, now we have this side scroll thing that no longer displays the day of the week and only gives you the date and how many days until they arrive. This is the one that really gets me. I host multiple listings in my house, and the previous system made it easy to see what activity would occur on a given day. This just makes that harder to do, especially since there is no way to combine my listings into one calendar on the Airbnb site. 

Here's me being snarky. I would like to remind UI/UX developers and their paymasters that there is this wonderful system called Community Beta Testing. It's a fantastic resource to test changes and receive feedback from the actual daily users of the website. If there actually was a beta, you chose your testers poorly.

[Sarah977]

@Jamie763 Perfomance used to be called Progress. Then they changed it to Performance, now it's suddenly called Insights? They have so many constant glitches to fix, yet this is all the techies have to do with their time? 

Every time they change the way things appear on our hosting pages, it's a change for the worse. More things hidden, 3 more clicks to access anything, nothing listed under a heading that is even slightly intuitive to the average person.

Not only that, they make these changes without host input, without any warning, and without explanation as to where they have now hidden what. It's like someone came in your kitchen during the night and rearranged every cupboard and drawer in some fashion that made sense only to them.

It's like they're trying to win "Most user-unfriendly website of all time" award.

[Emilia42]

@Jamie763 Looks like you are the test. My homepage has not changed. Yet.

[Mark116]

Mine hasn't changed either.  But 'insights' and 'performance' are not the same, of course Airbnb will always always choose the most obtuse, opaque language it is humanely possible to find. 

[Sarah977]

@Mark116  It's like the prep-time wording. "Block one night before and after each booking". 

To any normal person, that would sound like there would be 2 nights blocked between bookings, one after booking A and one before booking B, right? 

And in fact, there are posts here all the time with hosts who are confused about this.

What is not explained anywhere is that the "night after" doubles up as the "night before", so it actually only blocks one night between bookings. So why not say "Block one night between bookings"? Wording that anyone can understand.

Does Airbnb enlist copy writers from a pool of people who failed writing composition?

I can't be the only host in the world who has ever sent them feedback about this, yet there it still is, since 2016 when I first started hosting, still confusing new hosts.

[Mark116]

@Sarah977  While some of Airbnb's insanity may be driven by a very young staff, and clearly, nothing they do is ever beta tested, much if not most of the unclear language, I have come to believe is by design.  It is unclear on purpose.  It is heavy on PR speak and lite on specificity on purpose.

[Sarah977]

@Mark116  I agree that much of the wording is ambiguous by design- leaves it open to interpretation so CS can do basically whatever they want, or to put cancellation policy explanations in the fine print so that guests don't notice the part that says "minus Airbnb fees" or " based on the nightly rate".

But the example I cited above affords no advantage to either Airbnb, guests, or hosts. It's just poor writing skills.

[Elaine701]

@Mark116 

I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories. Too often, if you believe something is an organised conspiracy, you're giving way too much credit to people who very well couldn't organise a pile of rocks, let alone create an organised widespread secret conspiracy with thousands of accomplices.

That said, the "security deposit" term so often used by Airbnb has always intrigued me. There isn't any. There just isn't. It doesn't exist. And I think it's pretty safe to assume that all of Airbnb knows it, from Brian, right on down to the outsourced CS "ambassadors".

[Sarah977]

@Elaine701  The primary conspiracy at Airbnb is the disconnect between how they present themselves and how they actually operate. The bogus "security deposit" is a good example.

[Dimitar27]

My page is still the old one.

[Elaine701]

Perhaps I'm just "old school", but it seems to me that you can only sell tins of tripe labelled "tuna" for a limited period of time before people figure out that it's not tuna. 

But wait... this tripe is being fed to the hosts, not sold to the guests 😯

It's the hosts that are sold to the guests. Not the tripe. We're the product. The guests are the buyers. 

So I suppose it doesn't really matter how they label tins of feed for the "stock". As long as there's enough stock to meet demand.

But if stock declines, then maybe what's on the tin might matter after all 🤨

[Sarah977]

@Elaine701  They also sell the tripe to guests, though not as extensively. The whole folksy touchy-feely "live like a local" shtick, while in fact promoting the mega-listings property-managed so-called hosts, who are afforded special privileges like being able to charge a real security deposit, take cash payments for extra services, and refuse to refund guests for legitimate complaints. The listings where guest messages go unanswered, the photos make the place look 3 times bigger than it is, guests arrive to find the place hasn't been properly cleaned, amenities aren't working, they play bait and switch, and there is no one handling issues who is responsive to their issues in a timely manner. 

These hosts, who are allowed to continue with no repercussions since they bring in so much money, are the ones Airbnb wants, while acting as if personalized, hands-on hosting is what Airbnb is all about. 

[Ann72]

@Jamie763  While I don't yet have "insights" - sad face emoji - I do have the insanely annoying new reservations page.

Look at this - you can only sort it by arrival date, which is minimally helpful because that is the exact function of a calendar.  But you can't sort by listing, booked date, payout, or anything else you might actually need to know.  I've been asking for those improvements for a couple of years now.  But you know what they added?  They added how many days until someone arrives.  That's right, because it's very, very, very hard to look at a date and do that kind of calculation in your head. 

For instance, today is May 22nd, and someone is arriving May 28th.  HELP, AIRBNB, I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY DAYS AWAY THAT IS!  I CAN'T DO 28 MINUS 22!!  PLEASE DO IT FOR ME!

But because I am a genius, or possibly an idiot savant, I can easily glance at my reservations page and mentally sort it by Booked date.

You really have to be kidding me, @Airbnb.  I really can't thank you enough for approving this insult to hosts everywhere.

[Stephanie]

Hiya @Jamie763 

Welcome to the Community Center! Thank you for your feedback, we’ve shared this with the team. You can learn more about the new Today Tab here and the changes that will be rolling out from this month.

Let me know if there's anything else I can help with,

Stephanie

[Shirley43]

YES!! I agree. It is TRULY awful. AIRBNB please take note! It is so user UNFRIENDLY!! It took me 3 days (literally! I gave up each time) to switch from travelling to hosting. I resorted to using phone app which is better but also much worse than it used to be. It was so much better before. It is so confusing. Layout and graphics are awful.