Each week I will try to keep you abreast of the Shabbat.com feature upgrades, bug fixes, and future planning.
New features:
We’ve added the ‘date active’ notation to a member’s profile. The date active notation reveals a members most recent activity date on the Shabbat.com site or app. Helpful to determine the likelihood for a response to an invite or message. If a member’s date active is listed as of November 2013, It’s less likely that they will respond versus a member active as of last week. The ‘date active’ notation is visible on all profiles on the website and app.
The Activity feed (home page) contains a ‘sticky’ section on the left side of actively looking guests in your area for Shabbat.
Hosts should consider hosting these members as their status indicates they are looking for Shabbat placement. The actively looking status can be activated in the privacy menu on each page of Shabbat.com.
Upcoming
Currently we working to upgrade the entire invite and hosting suite from top to bottom. Our goal is simply to increase the chances of guests securing a place for Shabbat. Over the years, guests have expressed frustration over hosts not being as responsive as they hoped, and likewise, hosts seeking out guests in need would like to be better guided to them.
Invite forms will be simpler. Instead of a wizard like layout on a page – we will implement simple modals that can be completed quicker. Our research has shown that it typically takes 3 invite attempts with a guest to receive a positive response. Therefore, we will notate to Hosts if and when an invite was attempted previously to better assists them. Guest inviting and response forms to display past hosts and references (when applicable) letting a Host ‘vet’ a guest on the fly.
Hosts and Guests will have a newly designed ‘invites’ page. This will be a central hub for responding to invites and host requests. The page will integrate responding, messaging, and guest lists. It will be a central location to manage invites for both guests and hosts. You will be able to manage your own Klatzko Shabbat!
Expect this to be release mid next week (hopefully Wednesday, Sep 28).
Overall, we expect with more intuitive and streamlined inviting and hosting – the feature set will be more utilized and more Shabbat hosting will take place!
Bugs where fixed this past week:
- Push notification code on the iOS app and Android apps changed to reflect API changed from our push provider as well as support iOS 10.
- Android ‘post’ button on comments, messaging, and dating feedback fixed for sometimes not registering a tap.
- Activity feed algorithm tweak to prioritize material that is most commented on and liked higher in the feed along with chronology.
- UI tweaks to the mobile site for side menu.
- Upgrades to our bundling and minification of client files.
- Updates to the new Shabbat.com faq page (www.shabbat.com/faq) .
