Airbnb — new event platform rollout
End of August brought me new team with whom, over the next two weeks, I would work closely to roll out a new feature for Airbnb. Four gifted teammates : Frannie, David, Sofia and I, were entrusted with one task: to test the environment for a new Airbnb feature and give concrete solution.
Airbnb
Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book accommodations around the world. Airbnb connects people to people, to rent or host a space at any price point in more than 34K cities and 190 countries. It is the easiest way for people to monetize their extra space and showcase it to an audience of millions.
The Problem
Airbnb does allow hosts to rent their space as an event venue, however the hosts do not have a way of directly communicating that to the guest. The host can include that option in the description but guests have no way of telling which Airbnb offerings have that option.
Opportunity
Airbnb would like to create a first class means through its mobile app to increase the ability of event hosts and guests to find one another.
The Data Gathering
For the purpose of clarification we described hosts as owners and guests as planners. We began the process by sending out the screeners with a goal to recruit participants. Some of the questions on the screeners turned out to be not helpful. For example, there were questions about travel habits with the anticipation that future projects might involve that market. However, the rest of the questions allowed us to generate 48 survey responses from primary and secondary users and 8 interviews.
The Data Synthesis
We wanted to know how Owners and Planners felt about the current process, what was their pain points and what were their needs. We found out that Planners really enjoy organizing the events. However they complained about the long search process to book the venue. As one of our users said “ “We Researched about 50 to 60 places, chose 10 potential candidates, visited 5 and of course picked the 1” .
Price and location is also a big consideration when choosing a venue. In addition, many participants complained that when they find a venue it is unavailable, so availability is very important to them.
As for the “Owners”, they list their space for supplemental income. And even though they are more at ease of letting strangers use their house after seeing the success of Airbnb, they are still little concerned about safety. The “owners” demand the control with rules and regulations and a hefty deposit. One of the owners quote was : “I am open to try it, but only if I can choose the constraints. I want control.”
Subsequent Market research helped us solidify our new-found assumptions: the venue market is in demand, however person to person platform is not available on a large scale and there is an active demand from Airbnb users to list their venue as an event space. We definitively noticed that Airbnb users are demanding platform that would allow them to rent their space as a venue. They had dedicated forums just to address their concerns and questions just for that topics. Those forums and other websites turned out to be valuable resources in digging further into the problem.
The personnas
Connecting the research using the affinity map gave us a good overview of our customer base. The Planners were young professionals that wanted to find venues quickly utilizing filters and pay for them without writing checks. A middle man, like Airbnb, made them more trusting.
The Owners wanted control over the process and needed to do trust the Planners on their own terms. Utilizing contracts where rules, regulations and deposits were clearly stated was important to them. At this stage our Kathy and Debbie was born.
Kathy was a young, family oriented woman who is very social and enjoys planning the events. However she finds finding a venue to be a difficult chore. By the time she finds a venue it takes a lot of her time that she might have spend it on other things instead. She would like to have a platform where she could easily find a venue based on her criteria using filters. Contacting and communicating with the owners was also important to her, because that would save her a lot of time.
Debbie was a representative of the owners. Debbie represents middle age people who would like to supplement their income by renting out their space as a venue place. They find that allowing people to rent the space for an event is more profitable than renting it as typical Airbnb for sleeping arrangement. Debbie, like most owners, is concern about the safety of her belongings so she would like to have a security deposit and signed contract before agreeing for an event to take place.
The Problem Statement
Digesting all the data gave us a good sense of what the owners and planners wanted. We developed a problem statement that was revisited couple of times. The final version was as follow:
“Considering that many people struggle finding a perfect place for events that meet all of their requirements, how might we better connect them to unique private spaces?”
The Design Studio
Once we knew who our customers where, we spend our effort on building the prototype for them. We began with the design studio to brainstorm our new found knowledge. The design studio was extremely helpful to allow us to showcase our ideas and interpretations and build on great ideas. After could of hours it was clear that we have a clear vision in mind.
The Moscow
If the Design Studio gave us lots of ideas a clear vision of where we wanted to go then the Moscow table gave us a clear path on what features we should do first, and what features we should disregard.
The Wireframes
Once my team knew what we should build then we sketched the wireframe on a paper making many revisions. Once we felt ready we transformed our design to Sketch. We divided all wireframes into 4 parts and shared the work among ourselves. At the same time we completed writing the report.
Reiterations and Usability Testing
Our wireframes would be more beneficial with more fidelity hence we chose to add pictures as to make the app more realistic.
First round of usability testing bourgh us a great well of information from 6 subjects. We found out that some of our information is unclear. Subjects were confused about how we displayed the pricing, so we knew we needed to make it more clear. Users didn’t know that the price was per hour so they were very confused to see the total price.
Another example is that when users were tested to select the location they couldn’t easily identify the location they were looking for because it showed the same name “hamptons”, just different states. We needed to make it more clear.
Users were disappointed when they couldn’t scroll the screen down. Although it was expected we decided to make the screens longer to allow the scrolling down to imitate how the apps behaves in reality.
A lot of subjects missed our button to send a message to the owner, but instead they clicked on the picture of the owner. Our solution was to create additional screen of Owner’s profile from where they could also send a message.
Also, some paths for setting up the account was confusing to the users so we needed to clarify that.
The second round of Usability Testing was very successful. The 7 users were able to complete all tasks. We had few minor recommendations which we address after the Usability Testing. It was great to see that the reiterations made a difference.
The Presentation
Once our prototype was ready to showcase then we started to prepare for the presentation. Each person was assigned a portion of the presentation that they were supposed to prepare and for. The presentations were collected and Frannie put them together making sure it has a cohesive theme. The day of the presentation we had couple of dry runs both timed and not timed. It was very helpful and prepared us to present our findings to our clients.
The Prototype
The best part of the presentation was to being able to showcase the new Airbnb feature that we worked on for the past two weeks.
The prototype was build in Sketch and displayed in Invision.
Kate’s (Planner’s) prototype is displayed as follow:
Debbie’s (Owner’s) prototype was displayed as follow:
The Conclusion
Seeing the project build on itself and participate in every phase of it was very rewarding. Trusting the process is very important because the conclusion and outcome is not seen right away. It is an ongoing process of iterating oneself as well as the vision based on ever changing facts and findings.
Two weeks of group work is an interesting experience. It teaches patience, empathy and appreciation for one another. Some of the challenges were to accommodate different vision for the project or different approach to the tasks at hand. However the same qualities also make the project better. Different vision generated more ideas that were discussed and different approach gave us more choices to select the best one that would work for everyone. Also, having a team puts less stress on any one individual. Looking back I am appreciative of my group and what we have achieved. I truly believe no one would have achieved it by itself.
