Abstract
Airbnb has redefined how we think of travel, but the company is looking to expand beyond the shelter-portion of a trip. With it's strong community and emphasis on technology, Airbnb should design a mobile travel concierge experience to capture the other half of travel.
The idea of belonging anywhere shouldn't end at the doorstep of a host
Reflections
Information hierarchy is essential to an informed and intuitive experience.
What may be intuitive to a designer who has spent a ton of time working on something may not be intuitive to a first time user. The full experience should accommodate users across a wider range of familiarity with the product.
Visual simplification does not always translate into experience simplification.
Improvements
Home Page – A hamburger menu doesn’t help convey what the user will be taken to or what it’s value is. While the initial design emphasized the maximum space for viewing content, it’s not enough to justify losing a navigation bar. Moreover, given the real-estate the “Post” button takes up at the bottom of the screen it would imply that posting an event is an extremely frequent feature. This isn’t the case, as posting an event would happen less often than posting a typical tweet.
Event Feeds – The minimalism of the app may be too minimalist here, where navigating to settings is nonexistent. The upper corner of the nav bar would be a great place to stash settings. The “wifi” icon could be a more descriptive as well, with a label like “subscribed” or “following.” Finally, the post button, although ambitiously encouraging frequent posting, doesn’t belong on this page from a content-relationship standpoint.
Post an Event – While I tried to simplify the posting process down to something as simple as composing a tweet, the entered content shields the fields they are supposed to indicate. The pairing of icons with content isn’t particularly on-brand or intuitive, and the experience as a whole assumes a lot of familiarity with the process. I also think previewing the card would be important for either composition or posting, but that was not included in this initial mockup.
This was a case study designed in 2015 before Airbnb released its latest (2016) Experiences platform. Although this case is still relevant towards Airbnb’s product, there are a handful of UI and UX patterns that have since changed in their brand. A reflection on the case has been added to the bottom of this study that acknowledges these changes.