New Fields: All Ages and Free Play

For years now, we have been getting regular requests for two additional location fields: parents/caregivers want see whether a place is “all ages”; and people want to see what type of payment the place accepts. Side note: See below (fine if you skip to it) for how we could use your help! Adding new fields to locations is something that we never do (unless there is a way to programatically populate the data). This is because a new field means that we/you have to populate 12,600 entries (times 2 for two new fields), which is a lot. And it also means the interface will become more busy/complicated. So despite the requests for these tags, we were very hesitant to do it. The additional consideration was that it’s actually not simple to implement these correctly, and we ended up discussing how best to do it for years (and whether we even wanted to add them). For example, for all ages, some places are all ages until 8pm, or half the machines are in an all ages portion and half aren’t, do we track 21+ vs 18+ (etc.). For payment type, places take tokens, coins, payrange app, many other apps, RFID, or they’re free play at certain times and coin drop at other times, or the entire place is free play except for two machines, ETC. What is the best way to handle all of this?? Much of our hesitation stemmed from the understanding that attempting to accommodate every single case would add unwanted complications for users and would result in messy data. We needed to focus purely on the core problems. And after all this talk, we think that we were able to distill these fields down to the essence. Will this make everyone happy? No! But that’s ok. That’s not the goal. The goal is to solve the most pressing problems. So, what do people actually want? They want a simple location filter for “all ages” that excludes the places their kids can’t step into. So we added the value “Yes”. Given that a pure Yes is not always correct, we also added “At Times”.