75-min Airbnb Design Sprint

Hosts: Airbnb, University of Michigan School of Information

My Role
UX Researcher, UX Designer
My Responsibilities
Persona Development, User Needs Identification, Prototyping

The Design Prompt

Airbnb wants to improve the booking workflow. Currently, booking Homes, Restaurants, and Experiences together is a choppy and inefficient experience. Redesign this workflow to create a unique, efficient, and seamless experience for users.

Our Solution

We redesigned the Airbnb booking experience by starting with the first search the user makes.

The user begins by searching any trip detail (flight details, city, event, restaurant) to reach the trip timeline. Items can be dragged and dropped onto the timeline, which expands a daily calendar view that displays that day's schedule. The workflow finishes with a confirmation of the entire trip schedule and the user receives a One Ticket, a single ticket that can be used to access any of the booked items.

User Research (30 mins)

To ensure our eventual ideas created a better user experience than the current system, we walked through the current user workflow for booking Homes, Restaurants, and Experiences.

We identified the following goals for research:

Identify the TRAVEL CONTEXT: habits, motivations, and constraints
Understand how users COLLABORATE: how users coordinate and plan travel
Define TYPES OF TRAVELERS
Discover how users are INSPIRED

We interviewed each other and brainstormed the travel tendencies of other users. We defined 3 personas we wanted to design for as well as their respective needs:

We identified these to be the overall needs we had to account for:

Jane needs to be able to ask other travelers for tips

Jai needs to be able to share his plan on social media

Richard needs to be able to book a high quality trip with multiple activities

Ideate & Prototype (45 mins)

Using the identified user needs, we rethought the entire booking process and designed via tabula rasa. We broke down the process into 3 steps:

STEP 1: Start by searching with the Magic Search Bar

STEP 2: Choose Homes, Restaurants, and Experiences to book

STEP 3: Confirm trip

STEP 1 | Search in the Magic Search Bar

Enter [a city, a date range, an event, etc.] in the Magic Search Bar. It accepts any reasonable information to get the process started.
The system is linked to your email account and, similar to Google Calendar, will recognize any travel itineraries or flight confirmations. It will prompt you and ask to confirm the flight dates, for example, and will use the date range for Step 2.

STEP 2 | Choose Homes, Restaurants, and Experiences

An empty timeline appears at the top of the screen with one bubble for each day of the trip
Search and scroll through options for Homes, Restaurants, and Experiences
Click on an item to enlarge details and view reviews and prices
Chat with people who have visited the item to ask for advice, travel times, and other information
Click and drag items onto the bubbles to populate days

Dragging items into the timeline bubbles automatically expands the day's calendar
Items can be easily reordered and removed
Users can use the calendar view to plan travel time between items

Step 3 | Confirm trip

Final screen displays the entire trip in a full-screen view
Continuing provides a purchase confirmation
The user receives a 'One Ticket' that can be used as a ticket for any of the booked items for easy entry and less hassle

Conclusion

FullSizeRender (2).jpg — Our solution provides a smooth, simple experience for booking through Airbnb.
In the short timeframe, we developed wireframes that communicated the elegance Airbnb was looking for with the efficiency a user is looking for.

Airbnb Design Jam: UX Design