the challengE
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How might we design new features for the Airbnb mobile app experience to better support “group travelers”.
THE DISCOVERY
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Customer Insights
I conducted user research to learn more about the needs, motivations and behaviors of people who travel with groups. Participants who had extensive experience booking group trips on Airbnb were screened and selected. After synthesizing the qualitative data from a range of user interviews, empathy maps and persona boards were developed to reflect an aggregation of multiple users.
Once we designated our key persona type, Vicky, we were able to prioritize and support her goals. Our hypothesis focused on one archetype, The Global Culture Seeking Family Planner, which was used to focus on her needs and varying contexts of use.
“I’ll usually have to refer back to the host’s messages. Most of the itinerary info is in my personal email, some of it’s in google sheets. It’s all over the place actually. I’m always trying to wrangle the info from different places”
The variables were categorized into scenarios such as exploring the hosts activity recommendations and creating and sharing an itinerary. The empathy map and persona were referred to throughout the process to keep us grounded with a laser focus on itinerary feature enhancements.
Additional key insights that defined the direction for the product:
Activities inform packing
Guests will pre-plan itinerary activities
to help inform packing
Organizing leader
One guest will take the lead over others to build out activities for the group to assemble an itinerary and share
Self Guided Tours
Overpriced services and long tours from tourism companies motivated guests to organize ad hoc activities on their own
THE Journey
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Visualizing the end-to-end
We developed a customer journey map to visualize the users end-to-end experience across various phases and touchpoints. This allowed us to represent user pain points to uncover experience opportunities. Mapping out the low points was key to see where we needed to focus our attention for an improved experience for groups.
Analysis
For people who travel with groups, the itinerary feature’s lack of accessibility made sharing plans difficult. It was a source of frustration for users to have to search through multiple channels to find their trip schedule. The key priority was to enable users with a more efficient repository to store all of their plans and easily share with co-travelers.
THE framework
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Structuring the experience
Synthesizing goals and opportunities based on our research enabled us to focus on an optimal experience for the users of the app. We looked at a few high-level scenarios to explore prototype concepts that we could prioritize against persona needs and business objectives.
Sketching Interfaces - Initial sketches developed on paper to map out the design concept before bringing medium and high-fidelity prototypes to life.
User Testing - Paper prototypes were utilized to test the flow with users, identify any critical usability issues and iterate.
Wireframing - Wireframes developed to map out defined tasks and scenarios aligned with persona goals before fleshing out high-fidelity prototype.
detailed design
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The Prototype
Airbnb currently offers list sharing features, however, my solution reimagines the design and content presenting a more streamlined focus on the trip itinerary. This iteration eliminates the multi-page level search needed to locate the co-traveler invitation and offers metaphorical affordances to select and plan activities through quick visual cues. Additionally, the trip itinerary has been redesigned to include a full view of the activities planned to eliminate deep navigation and simplify the experience.
Users can invite co-travelers to join their trip giving them full access to the itinerary details. The invite CTA has been moved front and center to the “Trips” landing screen making it easier to share plans with group travelers.
Users have the ability to add events and trip documents to their itinerary right from the “Trips” landing screen, edit the itinerary together, and share out via text, email and more.
Validation - Guerrilla user testing conducted with friends and family who were familiar with the app to address last minute feedback refinements to validate the design.