Konawaba, Couchsurfers! Today we’re addressing a question from the Beta Panel: Why does Couchsurfing launch new systems on the website without obvious features?

We’ve been discussing how this strategy applies to the Events system as we get close to launch. There are a few additional features that members of the Beta Panel have requested we build before launch, like calendar integration and allowing events to have multiple organizers. My response has been: “I totally agree, but we’ll wait until after launch to include it.”

As you can imagine, this can be frustrating for members who have sometimes spent years asking for specific features we have yet to build.

How We Develop Software

When we develop software at Couchsurfing, we’re creating a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, an idea popularized by Eric Ries.

The basic MVP strategy is to gather validating data that tells you what your community needs, then build a system to satisfy those needs. Once you’ve released this system you can learn from the ways people use it. By first assessing user needs, then testing whether we met those needs by releasing a minimum viable product, we’re trying to find what is called “product-market fit.” Product-market fit means that you built a system that meets your user’s needs.

During most MVP processes, the development team has to gather data by creating mock websites that measure whether there are customers that would use the product they’re building. Since Couchsurfing has been around for some time, we already have members. We’re able to watch how Couchsurfers are currently creating events across Couchsurfing, Facebook, and Eventbrite. We’re also able to talk to Couchsurfers about what they need from an Events system.

Before We Start Building Software, We Look At User Needs

Before we started building the Events system, I gathered validating data for Events in a few ways:

• I interviewed Couchsurfers who organize events like CouchCrashes and weekly meetups about how they organize and what their needs are;
• I cataloged all the features that Meetings and Activities currently offer; then
• I asked even more people what else they were missing.

Interviewing users gave me a lot of qualitative data about their frustrations with the current systems. I catalogued all the features users currently have access to in Meetings and Activities, then reached out to about 100 more active event organizers across the world to gather what they thought was missing. I also collected ideas for features they believed were necessary. After doing this, I determined what our MVP for Events should be.

Developing Events to Address Two Un-met Needs

The two most notable features event organizers wanted that we didn’t have in our existing system were creating recurring events, and mass-messaging event attendees. By including those two features into Events, I think we’ll have created a system that better serves the community needs than either Meetings or Activities.

This is where we come back to developing a Minimum Viable Product and why we launch systems without additional features. I’ve made a number of assumptions in developing the basic functionality of Events, the MVP. If I’m wrong about how Events should work at their most basic level of functionality, I want to learn that as quickly as possible. The only way to learn about how people actually use software is to let them use it.

Releasing, Learning and Improving Events

By releasing an MVP of Events and learning from it, we’ll be able to quickly determine what to fix. Getting basic functionality down first is more important than whether a system has all the features that seem obvious from the first day.

This is why we release software without every additional feature (like adding Events to your Google calendar). Events should still serve the broad needs of our members without additional features, while also giving us time to learn before building additional “nice to have” features.

I’m aware that software was released in an incomplete state at Couchsurfing in the past and perpetually remained that way. The Activities feature is a great example of this approach. Activities has very limited functionality compared to Meetings and it hasn’t been improved since.

In contrast to our current approach, Activities were not rigorously tracked in order for  the team to keep improving it. Continuing to work on a system once it’s been released is a hallmark of maintaining product-market fit once you have it.

As an organization, we know a lot more about how Couchsurfers want to use Events than any other system we’ve launched. We’ll be collecting both qualitative and quantitative feedback after we launch Events about mistakes we made while building it, as well as features people need to create successful Events. And once we have a solid system that satisfies event organizer’s needs, we’ll start adding additional features.

Privet, Couchsurfers! We’re really excited to announce the upcoming launch of our new Events system. Members of the beta panel have been working with us to test Events for almost two months now, and we can’t wait to share it with the larger community very soon.

Background

Before we started developing Events, we already had another other meetup feature on Couchsurfing: Activities. (Some members also still have access to the predecessor of Activities: Meetings.)

For each feature we rebuild on our new technology platform, we have to choose whether to simply copy it from the existing feature or make serious improvements. Activities are a simplistic feature. There are a number of basic communication and promotion tools that Activities just don’t have (mass messaging, ability to repeat, etc). So we decided to create a new, easy-to-use and powerful system to support the meetups Couchsurfers organize every day, all over the world.

Our first step was to reach out to active event creators: people who have been organizing weekly meetups and Couch Crashes for years. By the time we launch Events, we will have spoken with over 100 active members about what they want and need from an events system. Twenty-five of those individuals have been testing Events with us as members of the beta panel for almost two months.

Let’s dive in to what we came up with together!

Highlights of Events

Events can happen once or on a recurring basis. Allowing events to repeat was easily the most requested feature of the new system. We never once considered making a new Events feature that didn’t include repetition.

Members will be able to create events that recur every day for up to two weeks. This type of repetition should help members who are organizing ride shares and roadtrips, as well as the people who organize Couch Crashes.

Members will be able to create events that recur weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. The “CS Weekly” events that happen all over the world are some of the highest quality events within the community. These events are fantastic for new members to meet locals to give them references before a trip, and provide a place to meet each other.

Members can “follow” recurring events to get messages and updates from the event organizer. We wanted a way for people who create popular recurring events to get an overall list of members interested in their events, so we made recurring events follow-able. This means the event organizer can easily message everyone who’s interested in their event about a special upcoming weekly or other opportunity.

Event organizers can mass-message members going to their event. With one simple message, any event organizer will be able to get in touch with the members who have joined their event. This will simplify giving directions, phone numbers and other information. And, if the event is updated by the organizer, the changes will be automatically shared with the attendees.

Members can share events with their friends. For a public event, any member who has joined an event can share it directly with their friends on Couchsurfing.

Keeping Activities Online

We’re planning on keeping the Activities system up for some period of time, to allow everyone to move their Activities and Meetings to the new Events system. We will not be migrating Activities into Events.

Activities will be listed along with the events on Place pages but you will need to directly access the Activities URL in order to create one.

Once we’ve moved most event creation to the new system, we’ll shut down Activities and Meetings for good.

The new system will do a better job highlighting your event, since they’ll have more visual prominence and be easier to navigate and discover. Since the system is designed to help make your events more successful, please move your previously creating events onto the new system! And let us know what you think. We’re excited launch this, and continue to improve it with the help of additional Community feedback.

Thank you, Beta Panel!

Many, many thanks are owed to the thorough work of the beta panel for testing and using this system over the last two months. Without the help of Kalyan Pokala, Brian, indoneezyan_gurl, the_juanderer, Tobias Kick, Geoff Soper, JessRK, Fabian Dreher, Olivier CHARVET, Stefano P, Piotr Mikita, Darek Wedrychowski, BRAMZ, Adam Danz, Mimmo Panza, Gerrit Deterts, Marcio Cota Martins, Ilmer van Golde, GPIKKIO, Giampiero Calabrese, and Massimo Bennardo we would not be where we are today.

Hello Couchsurfers, I’m Sam Houston, Community Manager at Couchsurfing HQ. I’m writing this week’s blog post to let you know about a few upcoming Place Page changes, including the retiring of the Community Details section.

What we’ve been working on

This week, the product team is still working on some underlying changes to the way we define Places. This is so we can easily create Places for islands, national parks, and urban and rural areas around the world. We will have more information about this in the coming weeks.

Upcoming site updates

We’re going to update the look and feel of the Places pages to make the background less white and add some color to the header by including profile images of local Couchsurfers. We will not display profile photos of locals who’ve set their privacy preferences as “yes” to any of the following privacy preferences:

• Hide in search
• Only seen by members
• Hide profile completely
• Hide group posts from non-members

Removing Community Details on February 12

In these product posts, we mostly talk about new features we’re adding to the website. However, we sometimes have reason to remove prominent features that aren’t being used. This Tuesday, February 12th, we’ll be removing the “Community Details” section on Place pages.

Very few Places have used Community Details in the two months it’s been available. Of the roughly 1500 Place pages, only 125 have ever posted any Community Details. This very low percentage coupled with data that shows very few members read the Community Details posts, tells us this feature failed.

Measuring the success or failure of Community Details

Measuring the percentage of people that use a feature is what we call “quantitative feedback.” We get quantitative feedback on each website change so we can better judge how to spend our development team’s time. We also get “qualitative feedback” about the website from the community via the beta panel, feedback forums, groups on Couchsurfing.com, and social media.

Despite several members creating wonderful content for their Community Details section, Community Details didn’t work both quantitatively and qualitatively. A few weeks ago we received qualitative feedback from the community that this feature needed better placement and rich text formatting to gain traction, so we moved it to the top of Place Pages so it was more prominently displayed. But still, the creation of Community Details posts didn’t change. Since better placement didn’t increase use, spending more time adding the second most-requested improvement (rich text formatting) didn’t make sense.

Quantitatively measuring Community Details

We used the percentage of Places that had Community Details as the main quantitative indication of whether it was successful; our secondary indication was whether members of the community read those Details when they visit a Place Page.

Community Details failed here as well. A member’s click-through to read the post is our best indication that community members need these Details. Of the unique pageviews that Places get, roughly .0005% of those included anyone reading the full post of a Community Detail. In the chart below, that number increased to around .00075% when we moved the posts to a more prominent place. This data tells us that even when the posts are virtually the first thing a member sees, they don’t read them.

Even when we moved Community Details to the top of the page, only .00075% of the combined Place Page and Community Details page views included click-throughs to Community Details. Almost too small to see.

Qualitatively measuring Community Details

Qualitatively, we also heard from members that the harsh tone of some of the Community Details posts made them feel unwelcome or confused. A few of these posts had titles directing members to new “official” city groups, which was confusing for new people. Others told members: “DO NOT POST COUCH REQUESTS HERE.” Those posts, coupled with its prominence at the top of the page, never decreased the percentage of posts flagged as couch requests. That tells us that Community Details are not preventing couch requests. It also affirms that members are not reading Community Details.

Educating and helping community members, both new and old, was often the goal of the members that created Community Details. As we continue to update the Couchsurfing website, the site will become easier to use and we will make various functions easier to find for new users, including Couch Search, Couch Requests, and finding local Events. The site changes and processes take time, and we understand that this is still more work to do on all of these efforts.

Building the right features, at the right time

The Couchsurfing site is undergoing a big transformation to support the growing and diverse community. At Couchsurfing HQ, we have to make sure our development team focuses on building the right features at the right time, and sometimes that means we have to remove or leave behind old parts of the site that are no longer used.

Community feedback and site usage are taken into consideration when changes are made. If you have any feedback or thoughts about this post, please join us in our Feedback forum.