[stareatgoats]

FWIW, I regularly use Airbnb for my travelling lodging needs. I usually find what I'm looking for (an apartment with washer, WiFi and many good reviews in the lower price-bracket).

But I always open the site with some apprehension, since I know I'm in for a bad user experience. It's sluggish, and I can't bring myself to appreciate how the layout and even menus differ (or even disappear) depending on which area on the site I visit. It makes navigation cumbersome, and hard to remember how to navigate between visits.

I would switch to a similar service in a jiffy if it had solved these problems.

I always suspected a lack of a top-down coordination to be the reason for these issues, thanks for confirming. I've come to believe that this kind of loose federation strategy mostly suits junior devs (on which a startup might be deeply dependent by all means), hardly a serious long haul business. I expect they will change policy in due course, or perish.

[tvanantwerp]

I've had the exact same problems using AirBnb. I can never rely on things to be in the same place one visit to the next, if they continue to exist at all.

I don't think AirBnb is alone in this. There are many sites and apps that change UI's radically with disturbing regularity. I've begun to wonder if there is a glut of UX/UI people in tech right now, and that this endless cycle of zero-value-added change is just an attempt to justify their continued employment.

[untog]

I actually think the problem isn't a glut of designers or UXers, it's an obsession with A/B testing and multi-armed bandit scenarios. I'm sure that at any one time there are dozens of A/B tests running on the site, and the inconsistency we all see is a direct result. Netflix is a similar offender in this area, I never have any idea where "continue watching" is going to be when I open up the app.