Is anyone else finding the website "updates" exceptionally annoying?

[Ziggy1]

As an interface designer myself I am becoming quite concerned as to why Airbnb keep forcing a poorly designed and unfinished interface on the users. This is called "featuritis" in the industry - where too many programmers keep changing and fiddling with the user interface, making it more and more confusing and awkward to use. The problem comes from programmers always insisting on "designing" for their own ilk. The programmer tremselves cannot be blamed, they don't understand that "ordinary folk" don't get excited about puzzle-solving and endlessly fiddling with buttons, they just want to have an *INTUITIVE* interface. The management need to understand that it takes somelike like Jobs who knows how to force the veryu curious programmer brains to design the user interface for these "normal people" and not for their own kind.

The interface has become slower and half of the time I am looking for something that isn't there anymore, my bookmark takes me to the least important page now, there are too many different buttons and links, too many of them take you back to where you're trying to get away from etc. Airbnb ought to send their presumably tormented and overworked programming staff on a hoilday like that Chinese businessman did. Seriously, tormented minds produce tormented interfaces. Think about that!

[Maria758]

Hola @Ziggy1!  Love the name by the way!

Anyway... WHOOSH!  Right over my head!  But I read your full post in hopes that I might learn something IT related and I think I did.  Thanks for the input!

Happy Hosting!

Izzie, Co-Host

LOV Puerto Rico

[Gus17]

Agree wholeheartedly.  Airbnb management needs to get in a kid to show them how.  Remember when Jobs had a young kid at macWorld (I think it was) set up a Mac network in no time while a bunch of professional techheads from a "PC" backround took hours to set up a Windoze network?  Why did Microshaft pay licence fees to Apple for some years to licence GUI features? Why? Because a simple user friendly interface attracted non-techy users!  Airbnbs host "interface" is undoubtedly in my mind the worst I have seen in 20+ years of professional/business and hobby use of the www.

[Fred13]

What gets me is how they are designing/implementing 'live', I trust this is the case, because surely this can't be the finished product.

Now when the host logs in, the interface comes across as not being able to decide which way to go; whether to go to options  important to hosts or keep on advertising to a visiting potential guest.

I now have 3 different bookmarks to get into different pages 'directly' because I can't find a path to them via the Airbnb 'home'.

The existing interface is frighteningly stupid. They need a brighter GUI (graphical user interface) designer badly and the techies do what he says.

[Helga0]

Sigh, so true. 

As a host, I rarely travel, so my favorite start mode is always host side. If ever I travel, I don’t mind having to switch, but if there is no current trip, it should always start in host mode.  Or let me decide to always start in host mode and Do that then every time and on every gadget. 

Personally, I’m interested in my calendar and in things money related. That’s Transactions past and future, which should have the guest name not a number, which does not mean anything to me. Then it’s statistics, to know, if I’m on the right way to earn money. Which means statistics about views and booking ratio and I would love some more, like percentages of available listings per kind or price range. It’s annoying to find that one out via searches in guest mode in an anonymous browser. 

All the fuzzy feeling, statistics about reviews, chats with past guest etc, could be stored somewhere, available on a click or two. 

Practically, the inbox is useless to me. I do not want to chat with Tony or Irma, as I don’t remember who they are, incoming or past. I need to see on a calendar, who is incoming and then check that person’s chat, to see, if I sent the instructions already. It would be great to have the calendrr with the last exchange being visible on the mouse hovering over the picture, to know if it’s done or needs to be done. A tiny checkbox ot two or the possibility to set color markers on the pictures in the calendar would be even greater. But I may be spoiled, as I did that in my work and to organise STR stays since 2002. On paper, computer calendars or excel sheets. 

[Helga0]

And evidently after two years of community center, it would be time to correct the error, that does not allow editing on the phone or tablet, even if you use a browser. One click back to correct a mistake and line four or fice are out of reach.  It does not happen any other forum I use - I guess ythe airbnb programmers  can’t imagine, that someone would want to write long texts on a phone and defined a maximum field size of four lines. 

[Marit-Anne0]

@Ziggy1

We sort of learn to live with it - warts and all 🙂