Proposing a new chapter for Airbnb’s story

Chris Eichler
Jul 23, 2017 · 9 min read

Airbnb is a company famous for making experience design central from their beginning almost ten years ago. This focus has brought them mind-boggling success and made them one of the biggest hospitality companies in the world by some measures, though really they’re a tech company that is about connecting people. Their potential for reaching beyond short term home rentals has become more obvious in recent years, with the unveiling of their new “Experiences” and “Places” features. With Experiences they’re opening up their people-connecting technology to hosts or guides who might not even have a property, but who have some talent or vision to offer. And with Places they’re featuring and curating the cultural offerings of whole cities. When co-founder Brian Chesky unveiled these new features in 2016 the reception was ecstatic. It’s a company with an avid user base of over 160 million, and it has changed many people’s lives; some hosts now make their primary living through Airbnb, and many people have had positive experiences as guests. It’s worth wondering what else they could do with a following as strong as that.

I was part of a team of three, along with friends Christina and Jessica, who were tasked with exploring an option for what else Airbnb could do in their mobile app. Could they open up many of their existing properties and possibly many new ones to events, instead of or in addition to home stays? The events feature, it seemed to us, could be a real possibility. After all, it seems that many hosts could be interested in sharing their homes (or other spaces) not just for sleepy strangers, but also for special occasions. It would be a natural outgrowth of the life-embracing sociability of the Airbnb community, a community that is resolutely not afraid of strangers, but rather is always reach out for new friends.

That’s all conjecture, though. Events bring with them all sorts of issues that are different from home stays, and we can’t be sure that there’s a need or desire for events on Airbnb without doing the research. So first we began by reading widely online about Airbnb and also some smaller companies who already have event venue finding functionality: Peerspace, Splacer, Eventup, and a few others. These companies have attractive interfaces and many event locations, but only in certain US cities, far from the worldwide reach and millions of users of Airbnb. They also are more geared towards professional audiences, on both sides of the transaction. Eventup especially seems to be a market of professionally run venues for corporate events. Peerspace and Splacer are often used by video producers or photographers looking for locations, and also by wedding planners. The latter two have reviews and the beginnings of positive, helpful communities. Getting into the market, Airbnb would be wise to study in depth the experience of Peerspace and Splacer. But the possibilities would be different for Airbnb. They might have a marketplace of much smaller, more diverse, and less expensive locations for all sorts of events, taking advantage of their huge, active community.

User Research

Our group posted a screener survey for event planners, and we received enough responses to do 12 user interviews. Our interviews with planners were matched with several with Airbnb hosts and venue owners, the other essential side of this market. On each side the concerns were consistent: the event planners needed many options in order to meet specific event criteria; they needed quick access to the venue owner in order to ask questions; they needed a way to get the right people to help. On the side of the hosts, the main concerns were the security of their property and the ability to screen applicants to use their space. One Airbnb host who had a lot of doubts about doing events in his space said that “when you’re in a space for a short period of time you tend to value it less”, and added that there is “quite a high risk for a one-off event.”

When you’re in a space for a short period of time you tend to value it less.

Event planners had plenty to worry about too, telling us things like “We had a pretty low budget, so we had to do a lot of work to make sure we got a place that we weren’t going to totally break our bank if we didn’t sell the place out.” We did the interviews gradually over about a week, and the competing and complimentary interests of the two sides of the transaction became more apparent as we went along. We transcribed the full interviews for several of our most insightful subjects, and all three of us got a chance to study the words. The process of transcribing was in itself helpful to me, and the time spent doing it was a time to think deeply about everything the subjects said.

We talked with each other at length about all of our interviews and we spent a long while passing around post-its of key quotes, a process known in UX design as “affinity mapping”. Grouping related sentiments together, we ended our research phase by constructing several fictitious personas who were amalgams of the people we had talked to. There were personas on both the venue host and the guest sides. Our event planner personas included Aliza, a detail-oriented young professional and bride-to-be, and Marcus, a 21-year-old DJ and party planner. On the host side we had Pierre, a French retiree who owns a large attractive property, as well as Melissa, a young artist interested in making local arts events happen at her house.

Our persona Pierre

Thinking about the desire, goals, and problems of these types of personas is a fruitful way to think about product design. We came up with two problem statements, one for each side of the market:

People who plan events need a reliable and easy way to find venues that meet their detailed event criteria.

Venue hosts need a reliable and easy way to find the right types of guests for their spaces.

I think that the the requirements of our two-way market and the pitfalls for all users involved were pretty clear in our minds when we began to ideate.

Ideation, Within Bounds

This was our team’s first time doing something that is very normal in the product design world: ideating solutions within the bounds of an existing product. Airbnb is rightly famous for their UX design, which has been an inspiration to many companies. We certainly did not want to change anything in the Airbnb experience that we did not have to to create our Events functionality. So the ideating process was much less a wild brainstorming session than it would have been for a brand new product. Already in the past year Airbnb has added Experiences and Places features to their mobile app, and we closely studied the way that those were integrated. We all decided pretty quickly that following the UI design of Airbnb would be essential, and also that the key to what we needed to do lay in the filters. If we could have on one side the event planning folks entering all of their requirements for the event, both through checkboxes and through text entry, and on the other side the venue hosts who enter all of their property’s amenities, characteristics, and possibilities, then great things could happen.

Christina sketching out filtering ideas.

Most of the other pages of the Event flow did not have to be drastically changed, was our contention. The top nav of the mobile app will now have an additional option: Events, and having tapped on that category, the properties(some of which might also be home stay properties) would be listed with the number of guests that they can accommodate visible on search pages. And on the filters page there would be important differences. The first is that we will have a text-entry keyword feature which we call “Key Words” in which the planner can enter all keywords characteristic of the event they’re working on. Example: “wedding, party, reception, outdoors, dance, music, summer, nature”. These would be matched against the pre-entered keywords of the venues. The location, date, and number of guests filters on the main search page would be unchanged except that for events we added time picking to the datepicker. The rest of the filters feature a number of details important to events, such as seating and stage in the amenities section, and parking and pool under facilities.

We worked the new functionality into the UI of Airbnb and created a prototype quite quickly so that we could get onto the first user tests as soon as possible.

Usability Tests

In our tests we discovered a number of key details that could be improved, but no major functional problems. One issue was that it needed to be clear what the end of the task was — was the user booking the space at the end of the procedure? That was not our intention. We planned to have the user send a message to the hose to start a conversation about the event, but our buttons and wording didn’t make that clear. Our users’ confusion led us to change our “Request to book” button to “Contact host for inquiry”.

A user test subject trying the Events functionality.

We also decided to add a feature recommending related local vendors, like caterers, musicians, and florists. Our usability testers spoke to us about all the help that would be needed in their event planning, and this seems like it could also be a lucrative business for airbnb. We included the “recommended vendors nearby” on later Event property screens, but that was all that we built for that subfeature. Fleshing it out remains work for the future.

Our prototype on Invision is here and we are proud of how smoothly our work is integrated into the attractive Airbnb interface. I hope you’ll click around in the prototype and see how it looks.

Going Forward…

This “integration feature” project was interesting in a lot of ways. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought so deeply so quickly about what an organization does than I did when I had to plan a major new addition to their product. The research took me to some interesting subjects, like property laws and risk levels and insurance, as well as the work of arts promoters, filmmakers, and wedding planners. There was a lot to assimilate, and there were difficulties finding the right people to talk to. Finding better strategies to find the right people fast will be important in the future. There were also difficulties in the ideation process within the team. We didn’t really feel free to brainstorm, but within the bounds of what could be without ruining Airbnb’s app there were differences of opinion. Living within such a successful app makes any new product a risk. There is a lot to lose. So early discussions about direction were not open and free, but rather wrought with pressure and tension from the beginning of the design process. And we don’t even really have the money on the line, since this is an educational project. I can imagine that the pressure is high for those who do. Whether Airbnb will add more event venue functionality in the future I don’t know. They are certainly branching out in the realm of travel and experiences with people. It seems that mass-experiences or events could easily be a part of that branching out. If they decide to do it I will understand why.

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