Conducting the orchestra: the secret behind Airbnb’s groundbreaking user experience
- Katie Dill, Airbnb’s Director of Experience Design, discusses great user experiences, and how they’re crafted.
- When you’re designing a service, it’s not just about one moment — it’s the experience before, during, and after too.
- How can you visually describe a business’ ethos so your whole team is thinking about UX?
If you’ve ever booked a unique place to stay on holiday, you’ve possibly already engaged with Katie Dill’s work. As Airbnb’s Director of Experience Design, Katie strives to build full, enjoyable and engaging journeys during the whole time you spend with Airbnb — and her attention to detail means that you simply enjoy the ride.
When she spoke at TOA 2016, Katie delivered a deep, insightful talk on crafting this journey: highlighting examples from business, technology and life. It was an ideal talk for anyone who creates anything for other people: whether you design text, images, websites — or something as complicated as a theme park.
Read exclusive extracts from her talk below — or watch Katie’s full, eye-opening speech:
How the Virgin America experience makes you feel special:
Virgin America is an example of good experience design in an industry — flight — that is pretty well-known for terrible experience design. But Virgin has done a few things that are quite noteworthy — and are exemplary of thoughtful, experienced design.
They get that it’s not just about one moment when you’re creating a product or service. It’s very easy to consider the moment of consumption as the moment to get right — and it is. But so is the moment before, during, and after.
So from the very beginning, their advertising is putting out a message: we are edgy, refined, and simplified. We’re different than your average airline. And that message continues through the digital platform: it isn’t your average booking site.
The physical manifestation [at the airport] continues to carry that story forward… the chairs, the fabric, and the carpet are all adding to that same message — and they’re delivering on that promise.
How Disney delivers a complete experience through brilliant, personalised “moments”:
Disney own everything: TV, sporting events, and — of course — physical parks. The parks are where you can really feel this idea of experience design. When you visit, every little detail is communicating the idea that you’re someplace else, where you are now the star in a new story.
Everything, all the way down to the food, is communicating this very special experience: even the trash cans spit out bubbles. The littlest detail is communicating that this is special, this is magic, this is another world. What all of that amounts to at the end is an emotional feeling — of a time spent someplace else.
Recently, The Magic Band (Disney’s RFID-enabled wristband) turns that coherent journey — that they have orchestrated so well — into one personalised to you. And so when you come to the park, they know it’s you. They know if you’ve been there before, they know what characters you like, and they can help you have a better experience because of that. So when you’re at the restaurant and you sit down to eat, they can bring you the food because they already know what you ordered; and they can know it’s your birthday so can have a character wish you, “Happy Birthday.”
How gig economy companies can learn from Airbnb to deliver a coherent, enjoyable user experience:
For a company like Airbnb, the person delivering the end user experience is not an employee: they are regular people that are helping to provide a service for those customers. And that means that there is a whole lot less control, and there’s something really awesome about that!
This uniqueness — while very special, valuable, authentic and unique — is also ripe for disaster. You don’t have direct control over the end user’s experience like Disney does. How do you bring order to that chaos?
Zoom out and have a perspective on what you’re actually trying to deliver. The user experience is not one moment — it’s multiple moments that come together before, during, and after. A good example of this is the symphony: that’s what a complicated user experience is. There’s lots of players pulling together and trying to deliver something really magical.
Consider how to bring a large group of people — within your company and your ecosystem — together. The way we do that at Airbnb is through a storyboard. A storyboard puts, in perspective, all the moments of the journey in a visual form.
It’s important that you truly visualise what can happen during somebody’s journey. What are the things that they’re doing, encountering, using, holding and seeing? This helps us understand where we’re doing a good job, where we’re putting forth a product that’s going to help people, and where we are dropping the ball.
So, first and foremost: make it visual. Putting it on the wall, where everybody can see it, is imperative — because again, just like the symphony, it’s not just one person playing that tune. It’s a whole group of folks: your entire company is involved in delivering that end-user experience, either directly or indirectly.
For Katie’s full, insightful talk — where she reveals how the Airbnb Experience Design team builds trust between strangers — make sure you watch the video of her talk at TOA Berlin 2016.
This talk has been edited for clarity and length.
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