Airbnb Redesign?
Where is it heading next on 7/16?
Last week, Airbnb quietly informed its “most valued community members” of a live streaming event on Wednesday, July 16, from the living room of the very first Airbnb. I received an invite as well.
There is not a lot of talk about it currently, but if you’d like to read a bit more, check out this VentureBeat article on the event that airs tomorrow at 10 a.m. PST.
Check back here tomorrow (7/16) for all the details from the event!
The New Airbnb Experience
It’s 7/16 and Airbnb’s live streaming event is complete. It was a quick 30 minute event with more than 14000 people tuning in from around 80 countries across the world. Three main topics were covered today: the new logo (Bélo), create Airbnb (where you can create your own Bélo) and the re-design of the Airbnb experience on web and mobile. Let’s take a closer look at the last update. More specifically, we’ll talk about the two most important pages — the search results page and the listings page.
Search Results Page
The old search results page was pretty good and all its features are retained by this new look page. As noted in this TechCrunch article, the changes in design and looks are roughly as follows:
With the launch of the new site, Airbnb has largely gone “flat,” swapping out its previous design filled with shadows and gradients and instead filling it with more white space and a common font throughout. It stripped text that used to be overlaid on top of photos and placed it below the images and added host photos alongside listings, so guests know whose place they’ll be staying at.
The most important of these changes is the fact that text on top of images has been completely removed. I do not know why text in white used to be on top of images in the first place — it was hard to read at most times with a white background and it ruined the images as well.
Besides that, the individual tile for a listing looks very impressive. It has all the essential details (like price, neighborhood, number of reviews and whether or not it is an entire apartment / shared room / private room) and the images look crisp. A small modification that I would have liked is to see the 5-star rating in addition to the number of reviews. For example, instead of “23 reviews”, having “ **** 23 “ (imagine the asterisks look like stars and the 23 is in a bubble!) would make more sense and take the same amount of space. It’s not a deal breaker, but would be more useful as the number of reviews doesn’t really tell me if the reviews are good or bad.
One feature that was absent earlier and hasn’t been implemented this time as well is the ability to filter listings based on whether they have reviews or not. As you can see in the image above, listings with and without reviews appear in no specific order and it takes time and effort to identify the listings with reviews. As I mentioned in my previous post, reviews is one of the most important and fundamental aspects of sharing services like Airbnb that rely on community and trust, and therefore, it should be at the forefront while browsing through listings.
Listings Page
The listings page has had a major overhaul. There are many positive changes to talk about here. Let’s start with what you see when the page loads —
#1 Carousel style images — The end-to-end and larger images not only look great, but also can be seen in full screen by clicking on it. The earlier version was crying out for this full screen view and we finally have it! And I must say, it looks beautiful.
#2 Reviews — Number of reviews and the star rating — Both of these can be seen right on top and it is a lot better than the earlier version where we would need to scroll down to have a look at them.
#3 Quick details — This may be the second most important design change on the listings page. You can take a quick look at basic facts like number of beds, rooms and max occupancy which may be a quick indication of whether the place meets your basic core requirements. I don’t exactly know why the number of bathrooms isn’t a part of this section, but nonetheless, it’s very useful.
#4 Host picture and name— It’s a nice touch with the rounded profile picture and the name, adding a more personal level of connection with the space.
Now, the best and most important change —
#5 Booking dates and availability calendar with price — It’s compact and gives all the essential details. While entering the check-in and checkout dates, you can see the availability dates automatically and that’s a nice touch as it saves you time in those cases where the place isn’t available for your dates. The best aspect of this feature is its size and the amount of functionality put into this small space. In addition, the white color of the price is against a black background and not the image. And too add to that, it hovers on the screen even when you scroll down! (As you can see, it’s full of tricks which are extremely useful)
All in all, this first look of the listings page is very promising. It contains all the essential quick-look details and the new images really stand out. But, it does suffer from / lack a few touches which could have worked even better.
#1 The carousel doesn’t work as expected — Try it out for yourself! When you click an image, it opens up a full screen view where you can scroll horizontally to see the other images. While this works as expected, the carousel arrows do not. If you click on them, it also opens up the full screen view rather than just going to the next / previous image on the page itself! I am not certain if this is intentional or an error, but as of now, it does not work for me and is irritating.
#2 Contact the host — As mentioned above, the host name and picture is a nice touch, but it’d make sense to have a “Contact Host” option right below the name, rather than further down the page. It adds a level of functionality to what is currently just a plain static set of information about the host.
Moving further down the listings page, we can see the list of amenities, Rules, The Space etc. which look much cleaner than before.
#1 — The update to the amenities section really improves that part of the experience and the icons have a lot to do with it.
#2 — The uniformity across the various fields is appealing and a vast improvement on the tabs that existed earlier for information like amenities and house rules.
#3 — The order in which the details appear is pretty accurate covering those fields first which haven’t been mentioned earlier. For example, price and calendar appear right at the bottom as they have been covered earlier.
But, the only problem I find with this section are the two images that abruptly stick out in between these fields (one of them shown in the image below).
They are poorly positioned and are an eye sore. It seems as if they do not belong there and have been forced into the layout at the last minute. Also, the most irritating fact about them are that they do not serve any real purpose.
Maybe Airbnb has its reasons to show two more images besides the main carousel image, but not being aware of any, I would rather do away with them. The carousel does a very good job of showing full screen detailed images with captions and it’s sufficient. If it is important to show more than one image, I’d rather add the images tile to the bottom of the main carousel image (like they had it in the earlier version) so that users can click directly on an image if they’d like to.
Rather than a couple of images, it would have been nice to see a smaller version of the maps section put somewhere here as otherwise, it appears right at the bottom of the listing.
The final section I’d like to talk about is neighborhoods / location. I skip over the reviews section as it is pretty similar to the earlier version and that worked perfectly well.
This end-to-end neighborhood map is beautiful. It contains information about the neighborhood (like Hollywood above) with good images and a brief set of things to expect. The ability to pin places in the neighborhood, as exercised by the host above, is very useful and is a good way to show the proximity of the place to nearby restaurants, grocery stores, laundry machines etc.
BUT, what’s with the neighborhood pop up covering the pinned places description? I am not sure why it’s like that and if it’s something to do with my browser, but I have tried a couple of them, and it is like that! Hope they take care of that quickly.
And finally, you must have noticed the navigation bar at the top with Photos, Reviews etc. for quick access. It’s very useful and needed by such a listings page to get you quickly to information you want to see. I wish the page scrolled slower when you clicked on a tile there. It’s a personal preference but it looks much cooler then!
So as we can see, a lot of changes have been made, and most of them are for the better and really enhance the Airbnb experience. Thanks for reading till the end; it was a long post!
