Adding a collaborative home booking feature to Airbnb, designed to make the accommodation booking process easier for group travellers.
The Challenge
This was my submission for the Kleiner Perkins Design Fellows Program design challenge. The challenge was to “redesign a feature of a Kleiner Perkins partner company’s product."
Timeline: January 2019 (1 day)
Tools: Sketch
Inspiration
Airbnb is my go-to platform for finding accommodation when planning to travel somewhere. Whether it’s a 10-day trip to South Korea with a big group, or a quick weekend getaway in Toronto with only a couple of friends, I’ve used Airbnb numerous times within the past year to find affordable places to stay that can accommodate the needs of myself and others that I’m travelling with.
Through my experiences of booking homes on Airbnb however, I always felt that there was potential to create a smoother experience for users like myself who use the platform to find accommodation for group travel.
Problem
With the features that Airbnb currently offers, collaborative trip planning through the platform is difficult. In my personal experience, when I plan trips with friends, usually one person finds home listings on Airbnb and sends the listings to everyone else through a group chat. All of the communication regarding looking for a place and deciding where to stay happens off of the Airbnb platform, which can be an extremely tedious process in which links get lost in the chat history, comments about the listings are mixed in with other unrelated messages, and everyone is constantly having to switch back and forth between Airbnb and the messaging platform.
With this redesign challenge, I aimed to make the process of collaborative trip planning a more streamlined experience through Airbnb.
Target Users
According to Airbnb’s VP of Engineering, Mike Curtis, 77% of all trips on Airbnb include two or more guests. This proves that there is definitely a need for more seamless collaborative features on the app as they can benefit a huge number of users.
The type of user that I’m designing for is: users of Airbnb; anyone who is planning a trip/looking for accommodation for more than 1 person.
There are 2 types of users on the “extreme” ends of the spectrum:
Avid planner: hard-core planning-oriented users will find these features extremely helpful as it will help them keep all the options in one place and encourage other members of the group to indicate their preferences in a way that is easy to track.
Person that prefers to have others do the planning: these users can still benefit from a collaborative planning feature by doing the minimal actions to keep themselves in the loop of what’s happening with group plans.
User Goals
To allow all members to contribute to the trip planning process
To have a place where everyone can see each other’s suggestions for places to stay
To consolidate everyone’s comments/opinions about each listing under one place
To select an ideal accommodation based on majority’s preference
To easily split payment and have everyone pay for their own share directly through the platform (rather than one person paying the sum and collecting e-transfers from remaining guests)
To let the host know exactly who will be staying at their place
User Flow
High Fidelity Mockups
Reflection & Next Steps
Due to the time constraints, I was not able to conduct primary research. If I had more time or were to redo this challenge, I would conduct user interviews to gain a better understanding of their pain points and what features they would find helpful. I would also conduct usability testing to see if my design solves users’ pain points and what aspects could be improved.
If I were to continue working on this project, I would explore how I can facilitate better integration between other existing features in the app. I think that the same concept demonstrated in this redesign can also be extended to the “experiences” and “restaurants” features on Airbnb. Users would be able to share with the group which experiences they want to try and which restaurants they want to visit by adding them to the collaborative list. This way, fellow travellers can collaboratively plan out what to do/where to go for their upcoming trip within one app, beyond just arranging accommodation.