<p>Published on <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/bridging-language-barriers-between-hosts-and-guests-on-airbnb-219027d62a75?source=rss----eb297ea1161a---4">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Wandi Liu <img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*-PBZFAcI4LOYEvYfeE8RSg.png"></p>
<h3>The KPCB Design Challenge</h3>
<blockquote><p>Redesign a feature of a <a href="http://kpcbfellows.com/companies">KPCB company’s</a> product. You are free to focus on any disciplinary area that you are strongest with: Visual Design, Interaction Design, User Experience, and/or User Interface Design.</p></blockquote>
<h3>My Inspiration</h3>
<p>For my redesign, I wanted to take a product that I frequently used and challenge myself to step outside the boundary of my own experience.</p>
<p>Looking back, 2017 was yet another nomadic year for me and my family —from month-long stays in LA and Houston, to day trips to Boston and New York, only one thing was constant — we always stayed at an Airbnb.</p>
<p>Besides domestic lodging, international stay is yet another booming market. Whether it’s vacationing in a foreign country, or a semester of studying abroad, Airbnb offers an opportunity for travelers to be immersed in a wholly different culture.</p>
<p>With the promise of adventure and immersion comes the challenge of <strong>belonging</strong>. Narrowing down on this topic, I wanted to see how I can improve the host-guest experience for international traveling on Airbnb.</p>
<blockquote><p>How can I bridge language barriers between hosts and guests?</p></blockquote>
<p>Having lived in an English-speaking country for almost 10 years, my family has become more and more comfortable about sharing homes with non-Mandarin speakers. However, not every host will speak a second language, and not every traveler will have a working knowledge of all the languages native to their destinations. What kind of problems may arise when a host and a guest attempt to connect through a language barrier? Some ideas immediately popped into my mind, but I wanted to validate them through actual user stories and data.</p>
<h3>What are users doing right now?</h3>
<p>In other to understand user journeys and pain points, I surveyed an official guide, user discussions, and personal contacts.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*fhT7ycjIh_9sgEdad17onQ.png">Base Vector by Vecteezy.com</p>
<h4>Airbnb-Approved</h4>
<p>Airbnb already has a great <a href="https://blog.atairbnb.com/hosting-international-guests/">collection of tips</a> for hosts to follow when hosting international guests. Most recommendations fell into these 3 categories:</p>
<ol>
<li>Use illustrative and paralinguistic aids to <strong>visualize</strong> content</li>
<li>Prepare labels in the guest’s language using <strong>translation</strong> tools</li>
<li>Embrace guests with a <strong>positive attitude</strong> and lots of patience</li>
</ol>
<h4>Observational Research</h4>
<p>In order to understand current user stories related to language barriers, I looked into Airbnb Community Discussion threads for personal narratives on hosting. I highlighted some of the negative experience below to illustrate real problems that users experienced.</p>
<blockquote><p>“…the mere fact that we did not speak the same language made it very difficult in communicating even the <strong>simple house rules</strong>.”</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>“…My apartment has a lot of <strong>quirky details</strong> (convoluted parking restrictions, a tricky shower, multiple doors with multiple locks and keys, etc.) and I’m having a hard time communicating all of these details.”</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>“…[verbal introduction around the home] is often <strong>overwhelming</strong> even to English speakers after a long day of travel.”</p></blockquote>
<h4>Informal Interviews</h4>
<p>Aside from understanding hosts, I also wanted to see what international guests were experiencing. I knew some friends who traveled abroad recently, so I conducted informal interviews to get a grasp of their experience.</p>
<p><strong>Guest #1 | </strong><em>had</em><strong> </strong><em>hosts who spoke ‘broken English’: </em>Many times could not verbally communicate, but could still get point across via gesturing. The experience was consistently positive as hosts were very polite and courteous.</p>
<p><strong>Guest #2 | </strong><em>had co-traveler who spoke some of the host’s language: </em>Rented the entire place, the instruction was in English so host’s English level did not matter as much.</p>
<p><strong>Guest #3 | </strong>s<em>tayed with only native English-speaker hosts: </em>Must have “language common ground”, need the host to speak basic English, otherwise might be turned away.</p>
<p>From these observations, I assessed the most frequently-occurring pain points in both kinds of user journeys, and chose to focus on a specific stage in the home-sharing experience to better leverage my time and skills.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/979/1*9rIjmwCn2a4BewiQFxQdLg.png"></p>
<h3>The Frame of My Problem</h3>
<blockquote><p>Create a better experience for both parties upon their physical meeting.</p></blockquote>
<p>I had two goals:</p>
<ol>
<li>To cultivate respect and friendliness before the physical encounter of two cultures.</li>
<li>To reduce the complexity and frustration of verbal communication when facing a language barrier.</li>
</ol>
<p>Based on my research, I created personas and user journeys to identify opportunities for improvement that could be made.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*WiG-xfhynpBHJCKRWozFKw.png"></p>
<h3>My Redesign</h3>
<p>Airbnb has an established set of principles underlying their design decisions, which is a key factor to its cohesive product experience. The goal of my redesign is to enrich the experience of new and existing users while creating minimal intrusions in the existing visual language. To do this, I studied and traced Airbnb’s current atomic components to prepare my own mockups.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*ykS6Fq7nJFCcH8uFYczDMQ.png">My traces of elements in Airbnb’s visual language (I used Avenir as the closest-resembling font)</p>
<p>Then, I improved upon existing <strong>post-booking, pre-arrival</strong> flow by</p>
<ul>
<li>providing the host with resources to help communicate functional details</li>
<li>familiarizing the guest with the host’s space prior to his/her arrival</li>
</ul>
<h4>Complete User Flow</h4>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*T32V_7sUhYrKD9B1ThlKQA.png"></p>
<h4>Feature Details</h4>
<blockquote><p><strong>Functional icons</strong>: intuitively communicate rules and actions.</p></blockquote>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/820/1*0oWaFJbSjA7MV55FXl3Uaw.png">Functional icons to illustrate house rules (credit: Vecteezy)</p>
<blockquote><p>Choice of language &amp; Progress status: subtly encourage the guest to review house manual and complete on-boarding process.</p></blockquote>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/796/1*l6AVjVCT8vy1njI5tkMbOQ.png">On-boarding process: card view</p>
<blockquote><p>The last impression before the first impression: establish a sense of cultural-awareness, courtesy, and respect prior to the first meeting.</p></blockquote>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/747/1*u1hpSQ3vQsTFOdL4E4cTuA.png">Message update on host’s end after guest completes onboarding</p>
<h3>In Hindsight</h3>
<h4>Much more data is required to design for the underrepresented</h4>
<p>The research I conducted was highly qualitative and based on a very small sample of cases, thus the results were heavily biased. If this design were to be put into production, I would want to hear the opinion of those who are not presented by the personas to determine whether this is the best route to take, or whether it has any negative effects. I would also want to survey a broader audience to understand the correlation between variables such as the existence of conflicting political opinions and host-guest interaction.</p>
<h4>I need another lens</h4>
<p>My goal was to understand a product challenge that I have not personally experienced in my use of Airbnb. However, I knew that throughout my design process, my own experience as someone who has faced a kind of language barrier would likely have influenced my product decisions. Because of this, I would need to share this idea with others and gather feedback — positive <em>and</em> negative, in order to step outside the boundary of my own perception.</p>
<h3>Looking Forward</h3>
<h4>An animation is worth a thousand words</h4>
<p>When I began this challenge, I set aside a limited amount of hours to complete it. Looking back, the most time-consuming parts were user research and copywriting (putting strategic content into my mockups). If I were to have more time to polish my redesign, I would incorporate animation through both creating an interactive prototype of my redesign, as well as visualizing the house manual.</p>
<p>Animation is one of the skills that I would like to improve on the most, for I believe it will play a huge role in transforming digital communication — as <a href="https://airbnb.design/lottie/">new tools</a> are created to make the integration of animated elements easier than ever.</p>
<h4>A small feature with a big dream</h4>
<blockquote><p>I do hope any host who [is] afraid of accepting some one who cannot speak English [get] a chance to get an experience like me. So we can all [feel] “belong anywhere”</p></blockquote>
<p>Here’s a quote from an <a href="https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Hosting/Language-barrier-Today-I-had-a-nice-story-to-share/td-p/478177">inspirational story</a> that I found while researching. Bridging language barriers is more than just creating joy and comfort through features, but using such interactions to cultivate a sense of acceptance and optimism that lasts beyond the Airbnb experience.</p>
<h3>References</h3>
<p><strong>Qualitative Analysis &amp; User Research</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://airbnb.design/anotherlens/">Another Lens &#8211; News Deeply x Airbnb.Design</a></p>
<p><strong>User behavior:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://blog.atairbnb.com/hosting-international-guests/">Hosting international guests: tips from the host community</a></li>
<li><a href="https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Hosting/How-do-you-deal-with-language-barriers-between-you-and-your/td-p/138922/page/2">How do you deal with language barriers between you and your guests?</a></li>
<li><a href="https://community.withairbnb.com/t5/Hosting/Declining-a-Guest-Booking-Due-to-Language-Barrier/td-p/444949">Declining a Guest Booking Due to Language Barrier?</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Design Patterns</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.mobile-patterns.com/airbnb">Airbnb Screenshots :: Mobile Patterns</a></li>
<li><a href="https://airbnb.design/building-a-visual-language/">Building a Visual Language</a></li>
</ul>
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<p><a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/bridging-language-barriers-between-hosts-and-guests-on-airbnb-219027d62a75">Bridging language barriers between hosts and guests on Airbnb</a> was originally published in <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io">Prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>


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