Designing A New Airbnb App Experience
Part 1: My design process
“Our business is the entire trip” — Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb
Airbnb’s mission is far from only helping people finding a place to sleep, but to create the perfect travel experience. And that means optimizing for every step of a trip, all the way from finding a place to go, making the booking, communicating with your host, getting there, checking in, figuring out the small but important minutiae of what you do when you’re there, all the way till you finally check out and start making your way back home.
But currently the Airbnb iOS app seems to be mostly focusing on being a booking platform.
As a long time fan of Airbnb and a host for many years, I wanted to explore how the Airbnb app could provide an easier, more helpful and more streamlined trip experience for the guest and also act as a supportive tool for the host. All this without removing the pleasant surprises and the human interactions that makes traveling with the Airbnb community so wonderful.
My Design Process
1. Understanding User Needs
To get a better understanding of the Airbnb experience I started by interviewing guests and hosts, looking at comments posted online by Airbnb users and reading through hundreds of reviews posted on Airbnb. It was clear that some of the biggest pain points for both guest and host was due to lack of communication around ETA or information around the logistics of getting there or how to use amenities.
To help guide me in my design process I created two personas: John the host and Phillip the guest. Airbnb is a two-sided market, so I made sure to be mindful of the needs and motivations of both guest and host.
2. Ideate
“For us, it’s a dance between online and offline. And this has been our biggest challenge. We saw it play out in the storyboard. We realized the key is mobile…. Mobile is that link between online and offline.”
— Joe Gebbia to TechCrunch
From the learnings I started shaping the idea of a push notification service resembling a virtual Airbnb concierge that serves up the information the guest needs about the booking when he needs it all through his trip. You shouldn’t need to dig through your emails or read long descriptions on the listing’s page to find the answer to your question about how to get there, how to check in and out, about the amenities and how to use them, the information in the house manual, house rules and other relevant information for your booking.
3. Iterate
In addition to the pro-active notification service I also thought it would be good to structure the Your Trip section to be more tailored to the chronological steps in the trip experience. So I started wireframing what this could look like.
4. Prototype
I created a clickable prototype by using Invision and used this to do more usability testing. With their easy sync features it was super fast to make changes and show it again to new people to see if I had made it better or worse.
5. Validate
With this process I could test usability improvements, but to really validate the new design in the real world I’d have to go on a new trip…. See ya!
I am not affiliated with Airbnb. This work was completely unsolicited and done in September 2014. Visit my blog for more of my thoughts on travel tech, hospitality, product management and user experience design.
