The ‘Experience’ and ‘About’ sections on sitter profiles are now separated by the reviews and external references sections. This means that there’s no flow to the information that we’re trying to provide and it feels as if most of a profile could be missed by HOs who are skim-reading.
Logically, it would make more sense to move the reviews and references sections to the end of the sitter profile. There’s already a hyperlink to quickly jump there, so it doesn’t need to be quite so front and centre.
It’s such an awful choice. Putting the experience section at the top makes sense, but why on earth would THS choose to bury the other sections that we’ve written all the way down the page? It’s as if the Product Team just make changes based on whims.
Apparently homeowners were asked what is the most important aspect of a sitter and they said experience so that is why it was changed.
It would have been nice of them to advise us as many profiles no longer made sense viewed that way. I had a headline about my availability at the top of the introduction section and it was then buried further down my profile. Many sitters changed their profiles after it was discovered.
“The desktop and mobile web implementation has also been written in an old codebase which has over the years prevented us from fixing bugs and making improvements.”
They are afraid to touch the code. It is ten years old, the programmers are not there anymore, it was probably poorly structured and not sufficiently documented.
This was a change that only required changing the ordering of a few statements in generating the profile view. Not too difficult, not very risky. But it may have impressed the bosses who wanted “pet centered”.
I re-jiggled my profile, so that some of things I used to have in the ‘about’ section, are now in the ‘experience’ bit to make the most impact without having to search lower down.
Even if they want to put experience first it makes no sense to have the reviews in the middle of the profile. It breaks up the flow of the profile that we spend so much time writing. My profile is all out of order and I haven’t had time to rewrite it yet. But it seems I’ll just have to move everything to the experience section.
I know @Marion - when something is brought in we are rarely told about it and when we ask they say it is ‘what members asked for ‘ but never back it up with any figures.
I guess that is why there was an unofficial poll set up on here so members could vote in confidence on the 5 application limit. It was closed to comments after a day or so and closed to voting after 6 days.
The limited results show a different picture to what we were told.
I expect a ticking off from the moderators but it is only the truth.
Thanks to this thread, i went back to change a few things around to our profile which made no sense anymore…why are they not telling us when they come up with another change?!?
Per the similar forum, as annoying as it is when there is a change like this – especially without information as to why – or even notice so people can fix up their profiles so they read smoothly – there is a simple solution. Introduce yourself briefly in a way that leads to writing about your experience. Then when you get to the “About You” part, just say “See Experience.”
I believe this thread may answer your question.