Airbnb - Group Trips
Overview
This project envisions a collaborative feature within Airbnb to streamline the planning and booking of group trips. The aim is to enhance communication, decision-making, and coordination among group members, ultimately making the process more efficient and enjoyable. The comprehensive exploration covers the identification of challenges, analysis of opportunities, generative research goals, methodology, raw interview notes, key observations, competitive analysis, recommendations for Airbnb, personas, user journey, and results from usability testing.
Prototype
3 Months
Secondary Research
Storyboarding
Personas
Interviews
User Testing with Prototype
Figma
FigJam
Procreate
Project Goals
Enhance Group Communication: Employ the "Chat with Group" feature within the group dashboard to facilitate seamless communication among members, eliminating the need to exit the app. This feature aims to streamline discussions and interactions within the group.
Decision-Making through Voting Mechanism: Introduce a voting system accessible from both the chat and the group dashboard to establish a consensus on preferred places or hotels suggested by group members. The goal is to create a fair and efficient decision-making process for potential venues.
Efficient Expense Tracking for Trips: Develop a dedicated space on the platform for members to record various trip-related expenses. As accommodations are booked, they automatically appear in this space, allowing for easy updates and expense splitting when necessary. This feature, accessible through the group dashboard, aims to ensure transparency and clarity regarding trip expenditures.
How Might We?
The challenge lies in seamlessly incorporating this new feature into an already fully functioning application, maintaining the core functionality, and ensuring it feels well-placed and beneficial in the overall context of the app.
“"How might we optimize Airbnb's collaboration features to streamline and improve communication, decision-making, and coordination for more efficient and enjoyable group trip planning?"”
Research
Insights
Based on the secondary research and interviews, the research insights gathered are -
Financial Discussions and Expense Management:
Users experience discomfort in discussing finances within the group, leading to delays and conflicts.
Managing expenses, especially splitting costs for accommodations, activities, and meals, poses challenges, especially when group members have diverse budgets.
Crucial Role of Collaboration:
Collaboration is emphasized as crucial for the success of group trips, involving collective decision-making on itinerary, accommodations, and activities.
Lack of collaboration can result in dissatisfaction among group members and impact the overall trip experience negatively.
Communication Hurdles in Decision-Making:
Communication becomes a hurdle when reaching a consensus on accommodation preferences, locations, and budget.
Deciding on a budget that suits everyone may require multiple rounds of negotiation, and finding suitable times for group discussions can be challenging.
Expense Tracking Challenges:
Keeping a clear record of expenses, payments, and shared expenses is reported as challenging.
Users express difficulties in tracking who paid for what and managing shared expenses efficiently, leading to disagreements and misunderstandings.
Complexity of Group Trip Planning:
Users face challenges in coordinating group trips due to the complexity of aligning preferences, schedules, and interests among multiple individuals.
Planning involves decisions on destination, travel dates, and transportation logistics, contributing to a potentially overwhelming process.
Competitive Analysis
Examining the competitive landscape is a crucial phase in feature development, and the research underscores the significance of this analysis.
Direct Competitors:
AirBnB: No dedicated collaboration feature; offers features like adding multiple guests to bookings and sharing listings.
Vrbo: Lacks a dedicated collaboration feature; provides a "trip board" for sharing listings and ideas.
TripAdvisor: Offers TripTogether feature for group trips, allowing shared listings, voting on itineraries, and booking activities.
Google Trips: Allows shared itineraries but lacks a dedicated group trip planning feature.
Indirect Competitors:
Facebook Groups: Used for planning group trips with shared listings, ideas, and feedback.
WhatsApp Groups: Utilized for planning group trips with shared listings, ideas, and feedback.
Slack: Suitable for professional groups, allowing collaboration on listings, ideas, activities, and budgets.
Storyboarding
In the process of developing user stories and personas, storyboarding played a pivotal role. Storyboards provided a visual narrative that illustrated the user journey, incorporating the personas into real-life scenarios. This visual representation helped in mapping out the user experience, showcasing how individuals with diverse backgrounds and needs interacted with the application at various touchpoints. Storyboarding facilitated a holistic understanding of the user's flow, allowing us to identify potential pain points and refine features to align with the users' goals. It served as a valuable tool for both conceptualizing and validating design decisions, ensuring that the user-centric approach remained at the forefront of the development process. An example is shown below.
Personas
The personas' demographics and backgrounds were essentially fictional, but adhered to the constraints set for user interviews, such as age, group travel needs, and a basic understanding of the application. Following this, most pain points, needs, requirements, and expectations emerged as data-driven insights intertwined with the fictional elements of the personas. The goals and motivations were shaped by blending the fictional and data-driven aspects. This approach involved creating personas and scenarios by balancing the fictional narrative with the insights gained from research, understanding overarching themes, and crafting stories that resonated with the needs observed. The fictional personas were tailored to represent the diverse user group we had previously defined. One of the personas developed is shown below as an example.
Feature and Promotion Recommendations
Following the storyboarding process and considering the personas and their attributes, several key insights emerged, which were then distilled into concrete features ready for implementation. This led to a finalized list of features, accompanied by clear strategies for promoting these enhancements. The insights gained from the personas played a crucial role in shaping these features, ensuring they directly addressed user needs and preferences identified during the research and storyboarding phases.
Dedicated Collaboration Feature:
Develop a dedicated collaboration feature for group trip planning, enabling users to share listings, vote on itineraries, and book accommodations together.
Communication and Collaboration Tools:
Implement communication tools such as a dedicated chat feature, shared calendar, or to-do lists to facilitate easy and effective collaboration among group members.
Group Discounts:
Offer group discounts on accommodations and activities to attract groups and provide cost-saving benefits.
Promotional Strategies:
Promote the new collaboration feature through various channels, including email marketing, social media, and in-app notifications, to increase user awareness and adoption.
Design Process
The design of this application went through the full process from research, design and testing. The design process involved:
Mood Board Creation: The journey began with the creation of a mood board, where I gathered a diverse range of visual elements, from color schemes and typography to design inspirations. This helped me establish a visual direction and maintain consistency in our design choices.
Initial Sketching: With insights from the mood board, I moved on to initial sketches. These quick and raw sketches allowed me to explore various layout ideas, user interface components, and the overall look and feel of the app.
Low-Fidelity Wireframes: Translating my sketches into low-fidelity wireframes, I started to structure the app's interface. Low-fidelity wireframes provided a fundamental framework to ensure that essential elements and user flows were in place before diving into details.
Mid-Fidelity Design: Building upon the wireframes, I transitioned into the mid-fidelity design phase. This involved adding more visual detail, refining the user interface elements, and bringing a sense of cohesiveness to the design.
High-Fidelity Prototyping: With the mid-fidelity designs as my foundation, I embarked on the high-fidelity prototyping stage. This is where I added the finishing touches, incorporating color palettes, interactive elements, and animations to create a realistic representation of the application.
User Testing and Feedback Collection: After completing the high-fidelity prototypes, I moved into user testing. I engaged real users, collected their feedback, and observed their interactions with the app. This iterative process allowed us to fine-tune the design, ensuring it met the expectations and needs of our target audience.
Iterative Refinement: The design process was far from linear. It involved multiple iterations, including revisiting previous stages as necessary based on user feedback and design insights. This ongoing refinement was crucial in perfecting the user experience.
Accessibility and Inclusivity Checks: Throughout the process, we consistently assessed the design for accessibility and inclusivity, ensuring that the interface was usable by a broad range of users.
Low Fidelity Designs
This is where the initial sketches and ideas took shape. Low-fidelity designs provided a foundational structure, emphasizing layout and essential user interactions. These designs laid the groundwork for the entire project.
Mid Fidelity Designs
Moved into mid-fidelity designs, the rough sketches began to transform into more detailed, visually cohesive representations. This stage brought the concept closer to reality by incorporating refined elements, such as color schemes and typography.
Intermediate Usability Testing Insights
Testing with Mid Fidelity Prototype.
Test 1 Issues
The login button is not visible on the home screen.
The search results are not displayed in a clear and organized manner.
The navigation menu is difficult to navigate and find specific features.
Test 1 User Feedback
Users found the onboarding process confusing and suggested adding more tooltips.
Users appreciated the clean and modern design of the app.
Users requested the ability to filter search results by price and location.
Users encountered difficulties in accessing their account settings.
Test 2 Issues
The sign-up form is missing validation for required fields.
The booking confirmation page does not provide a clear summary of the reservation details.
The messaging feature is not easily accessible from the user profile.
Test 2 User Feedback
Users found the search filters confusing and suggested simplifying the options.
Users requested the ability to save favorite listings for future reference.
Users encountered difficulties in editing their profile information.
Users appreciated the personalized recommendations based on their search history.
Test 3 Issues
The checkout process is confusing and lacks clear steps.
The map view does not display accurate location markers for listings.
The messaging notifications are not consistently delivered to users.
Test 3 User Feedback
Users found the search results sorting options helpful in finding the most relevant listings.
Users suggested adding a feature to save search filters for future use.
Users encountered difficulties in canceling a reservation and requested a more intuitive process.
Users appreciated the responsive design of the app across different devices.
High Fidelity Designs
The high-fidelity prototypes represent the culmination of the design process. Here, every detail was meticulously refined, and interactive elements were introduced to create a lifelike user experience. These prototypes provided a compelling and realistic vision for Scout. The cherry on top comes from the completely prototyped application that made users feel that it is an application that is live.
Onboarding
This part involves the onboarding process to highlight the new feature addition and give an overview of what they can do with it. Typically a tutorial also follows for features involving multiple steps.
Groups Home
The groups home provides an overview of all the groups, accessed from the "Trips" tab on the bottom navigation bar.
Create and manage groups within the Trips page.
Groups and Settings
The introduction of the groups feature enables members to organize group trips and monitor shared expenses. The chat functionality proves valuable in moments of intense discussions and when decisive decisions need to be made.
Chats and Votes
Chat feature also allows for members to share trip suggestions and vote directly on the app to come to a consensus.
Users can access messages from the inbox tab on the bottom navigation bar.
Money Matters
Expense tracking and settling trip expenses is often a challenge and this feature aims to ameliorate the situation between friends and family by constantly keeping track of expenses and allowing for payments directly from the app.
Next Steps
Strategic User Experience Enhancements:
Prioritize Visibility and Accessibility:
Ensure that essential features like login, account settings, and messaging are easily accessible and visible.
Conduct a thorough review of the navigation menu to enhance user-friendliness.
Enhance Reservation and Booking Process:
Streamline the checkout process, providing clear steps for users.
Improve the booking confirmation page to offer a concise summary of reservation details.
Simplify the cancellation process and make it more intuitive for users.
Strengthen Messaging Features:
Ensure the messaging feature is easily accessible from user profiles and throughout the app.
Address inconsistencies in the delivery of messaging notifications for a more reliable communication experience.
Address User Requests:
Implement features requested by users, such as the ability to filter search results, save favorite listings, and enhance profile editing functionality.
Conclusion
Reflecting on the design prototype for the Airbnb feature addition project unveils the delicate equilibrium between continuous refinement and timely product release. Throughout this project, the dual significance of data-driven decisions and empathetic user understanding became apparent. While data laid a solid foundation, the instrumental role of personas, scenarios, and storyboards in infusing emotion into the analytical process became evident.
In addition to these insights, there's a recognition of the need to explore additional methods, especially in a corporate setting, to effectively convey the importance of user-centered design to stakeholders. The focus revolves around discovering persuasive strategies for designers, often lacking direct decision-making power, to influence higher stakeholders and encourage the embrace of user-centered design principles for the ultimate benefit of users. This aligns with the insights shared by Amy Ko on the critical role of designer advocacy.
In conclusion, the Airbnb feature addition project not only deepened the understanding of user experience design but also shed light on the ongoing challenges and opportunities in advocating for user-centered principles within corporate decision-making processes.