About the Brand
Airbnb is a company with strong values around community and love. The brand is built around the idea that everyone should be able to take the perfect trip, including where they stay, what they do, and who they meet. To that end, they empower millions of people around the world to use their spaces, passions, and talents to become entrepreneurs, all while maintaining a strong and progressive identity.
While this works well with individuals and small groups of people, the post-meetup interaction is minimal, and engagement with the community is limited. Most groups opt for tour guides, local events, or nothing at all. On top of this, getting large group Airbnbs together is a difficult task, even more so in unique locations. This puts company retreats, friend group vacations, or multiple-family trips at a disadvantage when finding Airbnbs.
Project Goals:
The Design Process
For this project, I broke the design process into 4 main steps. Research, user personas, prototyping, and testing. This covered the core tenants of an experimental design project, and as it was an individual exploration, I took all of the user research and interviews into my own hands.
Research: For the initial research, I needed to figure out what Airbnb was at it's core, and who was using it. I dug through Google Analytics, AirDNA, Semrush, and much more to gather data on users, and turned to https://airbnb.design to acquaint myself with DLS.
User Personas: When creating the user personas, I had to take into account what was unique about Sites, and dig into that niche. While 34% of Airbnb users were 25-36, 44% of employees on corporate retreats were 30-40. I constructed use cases, affinity maps, and empathy maps to understand the value that each user wanted out of the platform.
Prototyping: Once I had a solid grasp on the user and their needs, I did some user interviews to validate my assumptions, then took to Figma. After 2-3 days I had relatively high fidelity prototypes which I ran by many target users to get feedback on, then iterated. I rinsed and repeated this process 4-5 times until I had it at a state of overwhelming satisfaction, then began to polish.
Testing: After the mockups were finished and an interactive prototype was created, I began sharing what I had. I was gathering data on usability, interface feedback, task completion rate, clicks until completion, and more KPIs. I factored this in and worked on refining the user-flow to reach a streamlined point, put it out for testing again, and eventually got where I am now.
