Airbnb Discover
NEW PRODUCT | iOS APP
OVERVIEW
Airbnb Discover provides users with a platform where they can discover what friends are doing around the world. Users can save all the things they want to do for future travels.
METHODS
User Interviews
Screener Surveys
Competitor/Comparator Analysis
Persona Development
Journey Mapping
Design Studio
Sketching
Wireframes
Iterative Testing
Rapid Prototyping
Usability Testing
TOOLS
Sketch
Adobe CS
InVision
TEAM
Meghan Salviejo
Zameer Rehmani
MY ROLE
UX Researcher
UX Designer
UI Designer
1. RESEARCH & SYNTHESIS
-
User Interviews
-
Used screener survey to find 5 users who have travelled one or more times in the past year
-
-
Affinity Mapping
-
Found behavioral patterns and pain points of users
-
-
Persona Development
-
Created a persona with behaviors, goals, needs, and pain points to drive design studios
-
-
Journey Mapping
-
Created a journey map to further highlight the pain points that our product can address
-
OF USERS GET INFORMATION FATIGUE WHEN RESEARCHING FOR TRAVEL PLANS ONLINE
OF USERS ARE CONCERNED ABOUT THE CREDIBILITY OF ONLINE
TRAVEL RESOURCES
OF USERS DEPEND ON FRIENDS FOR #1 SOURCE OF TRAVEL RECOMMENDATIONS
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Users are overwhelmed when choosing travel destinations/activities online because of the amount of information available. They reach out to their friends for recommendations because they trust their experiences.
How might we make travel recommendations from users' friends more easily accessible to them?
"Recommendations from my friends are the best because they have similar interests and know all the best places to go."
2. IDEATION & ITERATION
-
Design Studio 1
-
We sketched and shared our ideas quickly
-
Create, Deliberate, Document, and Repeat
-
-
Feature Prioritization
-
White-boarded as a team to determine which features were more necessary based on research
-
Created a priority matrix to further prioritize
-
-
Design Studio 2
-
We sketched ideas again based on feature prioritization and
-
-
Wireframes and user flows
-
We created wireframes and user flows which led to usability testing
-
-
Prototyping in Sketch
-
Usability Testing (2 Rounds)
FEATURE PRIORITIZATION
Every design decision my team made was justified by research. The diagram shown is a snapshot of how we approached the problem. From left to right we list research findings, persona behaviors, design decisions, features, and hook model considerations.
Whiteboarding as a team allowed us to work through the ideation process efficiently and collaboratively. Every design decision was justified by our findings which kept us on track into our design studios.
DESIGN STUDIO 2 / WIREFRAMING
MAP AND SOCIAL FEED
Users want to know what their friends are doing around the world so they can discover travel ideas. Airbnb Discover gives users a map and social feed to discover friends' activities in multiple ways.
BOOKMARKS AND LISTS
Users want to save activities their friends have done for future travels. Airbnb Discover provides users with the ability to bookmark activities and create lists from them.
USABILITY TESTING
Two rounds of usability testing were conducted on mid-fidelity and high-fidelity interactive prototypes with 7 users. Testing subjects were screened to fit the target user (has traveled more than once in the past year either domestically or internationally, and is a millennial, which is the majority of Airbnb's current user base).
PROTOTYPE FEATURES
TASKS
1
Explore the App to find out more about what your friends have done recently.
2
View an activity to learn more about it, and bookmark it for future reference
3
Go check out your saved bookmarks
4
Now you are doing an activity, use the app to check into that activity
TEST RESULTS ON FINAL PROTOTYPE
"There's a lot of space around the information so it's easy to see what's important. And it's familiar."
"I love that I can see what other people are doing. And it's also nice to know what to do in the city where I live."
"It's good for people like me who have wanderlust."
FINAL THOUGHTS
The team presented our research, design, and testing to stakeholders. Moving forward we want to conduct additional testing on the final product and build out additional features. Working on this project allowed us to really take advantage of the UX process from start to finish and to really focus design on user needs. There were many directions for us to go in the problem space but we focused on the primary needs to deliver a viable product that fills an existing opportunity space.
