Improving the Airbnb experience with an interactive assistant — a UX case study

I have a friend who is an Airbnb Host with three years of experience. He knows me as a creative individual, and he asked me to help him to improve his hospitality rate. He has hosted more than 2000 guests, and most of them have had generally the same questions and needs. In this Case Study I am not going to talk about the process before booking the place (i.e. how important it is to have professional photos, good prices, free parking, accurate descriptions and so on.) This case study will focus on guest processes and experiences after booking, and specifically those things that occur after their check-in experience. I put my UX design hat on and ventured into the wild to see if I could come up with new creative solutions to help my friend and other hosts improve the hospitality rate.

Goal

Improve a host’s hospitality rate and make a guest’s stay experience stress-free.

My role in this project: Product Designer / Front-end Developer

Instruments: Adobe XD, ReactJS, Illustrator, Photoshop

My design process

I followed IDEO’s Human-Centered Design and Lean UX Design Thinking process to make sure that my design decisions were supported by user research and feedback.

Research

As an experienced host, my friend already had a multitude of data about his guests. However, I decided to engage in additional research, focusing mostly on hospitality feelings. I wanted to base my and his concepts of understanding hospitality behaviors and guests’ expectations upon their nationality, age, personas, and background.

“If you want to improve any product all you need to do is watch people using it and see when they grimace, and then you can fix it” — IDEO

Personas

Interview

I interviewed nearly 100 guests and 5 hosts. Also, I asked a few hosts to analyze their booking history to better understand demography and common issues. It’s important to divide all the guests into the segmented groups to understand which group requires more attention and where the major pain points are hiding. I wanted to clarify these questions:

• What do guests feel when hosts meet them in person?
• What do guests feel when they enter an empty house and nobody meets them?
• How do guests interact with an unfamiliar home environment when they check-in?
• Hosts responsiveness behaviors
• Guests / Hosts shyness elimination factors
• Expectations/reality key factors
• Hospitality key points that make guests want to come to this house again
• How scrutinizing guests are when using the Airbnb app to understand all booking nuances during their stay, and how often they interact with the app
• Typical guest issues, resolution, behavior
• Hospitality factors that impact positive/negative reviews

This infographic heatmap below summarizes my research and gives us better insight into guest and host issues.

Behavior Patterns by Age Group

Geography of the language barrier

Empathy map for better digital experience

Following Paul Boag’s suggestions I always customize my empathy maps templates every time for the specific project needs, I found this handy and more useful than just using patterns from the internet.

Identifying and Prioritizing Pain points

Defining the Problems

I decided to tackle the four problems that were both important to guests and hosts. I redefined the pain points below

Problem 1. Miscommunication issue between guests and host when a host is not at home

Many hosts have full-time jobs and most of the time when the guests are checking in and out the hosts are not at home, and they are not able to meet guests in person and walk them through amenities and house rules. Moreover, hosts can’t deliver their smiles to guests, and it leads to losing that personal touch with the guests. Sometimes even during their stay, hosts don’t see them at all.

Problem 2. Guests don’t understand house rules or how to use the amenities

Even though the host may have many signs and instructions on the walls very often it doesn’t help. Some guests don’t mention it, some don’t understand because of a language barrier, and sometimes they intentionally ignore what’s posted.

Problem 3. Hosts need to answer the same questions over and over again

Most of the quests have the same question, which takes so much time for hosts to answer over and over again. And sometimes it’s not possible to answer promptly if the host is busy at work.

Problem 4. Guests don’t read listing descriptions and house rules very carefully, and sometimes they don’t even open an Airbnb app during their stay

There are multiple reasons why this happens. Sometimes the people who live in the house are not the same individuals who booked the place so they don’t have any access to the booking information. Sometimes people are not familiar with an Airbnb app and find it difficult to use, so they struggle every time when they need to open it. And of course, a language barrier doesn’t allow guests to consume all the information properly from the outset.

Guests Issue journey map

I like design strategist erika’s view on user flows and tasks flows, I decided to consolidate these two terms into one single diagram. This is a little busy I think for the readers so it’s better to keep it separate for the future but this particular diagram is mostly for myself to organize the whole user experience process in my mind so I kept this diagram the way it is.

Proposal

We spent quite a long time brainstorming to find the best solution that tackles all the problems mentioned above. Here are the options that we decided to stay away from:

• We didn’t want to create just another mobile app for guests so they have to connect to wifi first, then go to Play Store, download it, etc. This would actually make the process even more difficult for guests.
• We also stepped away from the idea of creating a website and just sending a link to the guest. It seems like a reasonable solution but it has some downsides, like for example when people initially check-in they don’t have a wifi connection. This then meant that there is a big chance we would lose them. Of course, we can send them a link via the Airbnb app a few days before they arrive, but this makes no sense. Unless the guests are inside the house at the time of receiving instructions, the content will not make any sense.
• We could increase the number of paper wall signs but when it’s too much it seems like guests are not welcome here and also they just don’t generally pay attention to it.

After a few weeks of brainstorming, we decided to use a tablet as a digital interactive assistant. This is a very flexible solution because it can be installed on the most visible place in the room and it will always be on so guests have almost no chance of avoiding it. The home screen will be personalized with the guest’s photo and name in their own language so it will evoke curiosity and desire to make the first click. Also, it doesn’t require any installation or technical skills.

Design principles

1)Super simple interface to make it more convenient for older people to use

The simplest interface can make your application look weak and many designers try to add some elaborate details. But in the case of this project, maximum simplicity will allow a quick understanding of the application not only for advanced users but also for older travelers who are not so good at using modern technologies.

2) Personalized home screen with Welcome message and guest’s name in their own language

When a guest first encounters the device the first thing they see is their name and photo. It helps to build the trust between the app and a guest. The guests begin to feel more comfortable and understand that the device is waiting for them. And in this case, guests will be more likely to make the first click

3) Multi-language to make it easy for international users

Of course, English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, but not all the people speak it at a fairly comfortable level. Therefore, multilingualism is so important to ensure the maximum level of accessibility of information for the user, as well as for understandable and comfortable communication between the guest and the owner. This is why the instructions and information provided for all guests as they click their way through the tablet’s presentation will be provided in English as well as their language.

4) Minimum reading — maximum visualization (video / audio)

Information in text form is perceived differently and often less clearly than that which is obtained from a picture, video or audio recording. It takes longer to read the text. Plus, again, the information in the text can be perceived differently by different people, so the text may not be unambiguous. However, a photo or video will be unambiguously perceived by the maximum number of people, as they are much easier to understand.

5) AirBnb Design System

Maintaining the basic colors and visual characteristics of the Airbnb application will help guests feel this device is a part of the Airbnb ecosystem which is not in reality. It will help smooth out the discomfort that people experience when they use a new app for the first time.

Content Strategy (information architecture)

I made a list of all the content that guests need and grouped it into categories to make it easier for guests to digest.

Site map

As mentioned above, we decided to adopt a minimalistic design with minimum textual context to ensure maximum ease of interaction.

Ideating the Solution

Then it was time to start sketching. I came up with several potential solutions to each of the pain points and made some rough UI sketches.

High Fidelity

I did some preliminary validation on the Lo-Fi UI sketches and used the feedback to refine my sketches and narrow down my solutions for the Hi-Fi mockups.

Result

Now after launching an MVP I am going to gather users’ feedback and make different kinds of testing such as a/b testing, AI facial emotion test, and Google Analytics to track user behavior and pain points using the App. It will help me better understand our users to make better UI/UX decisions for future updates. That’s what we’ve got so far + real-world use case.

Ans this is probably the best result any host can imagine

Takeaways

Airbnb is a good app with a great mission. They have put forth a tremendous deal of effort to make guest and host experiences as smooth as possible. Their app is packed with a lot of powerful tools, such as a guide book, instructions, tips, and so on. However, sometimes it’s hard for a big company to catch small problems that hosts and guests face on a regular basis. That is why this made for an ideal case study. It has provided a great opportunity to take an app thousands of people use the world over, and make it just one step better for all who rely on it. It’s something to think about.

If you are an Airbnb host or just thinking to become one, please feel free to reach out to me.

Note: I do not work for, nor am I affiliated with, Airbnb. I did this UX case study as I am a product designer who likes to solve problems.

Thanks for reading! If you want to collaborate, talk about product design, or just want to say hello, hit me up at goldrix96@gmail.com or connect via LinkedIn.