Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Rishabh Singh

The Thanksgiving break of 2017 was fast approaching, and our group of 8 friends scrambled to book a space on Airbnb for Lake Tahoe, CA. The cabin listing we liked mentioned 8 beds, 2 bathrooms, and a kitchen along with a bunch of pictures. We booked this listing since it matched our ‘decent enough for the price’ requirement.

What we found when we got to the cabin left us jaw dropped! The den had comfortable couches and a fireplace. The beautiful bedrooms had unexpected needs taken care of. We had multiple parking spots ready and available for all our vehicles. With more time at the cabin, we caught up on a movie on the television and Bluetooth speakers, and we also made full use of the spices in the kitchen for cooking amongst the range of pots and pans available.

Amongst these were amenities that were not showcased in the cabin listing. Even though these amenities provided for a delightful experience, I was puzzled. With Lake Tahoe being a competitive market for Airbnb listings, one would believe that hosts would list down every amenity that they could possibly provide. The listing was far from what we all expected.

UX Problem Emerges

“Airbnb doesn’t tell me a whole lot about my competitors”

I got in touch with the host and starting asking questions about this. I was surprised to find that the host was unaware that these extra amenities were uncommon and were potentially contributing to the Airbnb ratings. In addition, the host was concerned about how AirBnB does not allow for performance information with respect to competitors, which makes it difficult to create evenly matched listings.

In fact, if you navigate to the hosting side of Airbnb’s mobile app and tap on “Stats”, you’ll see static information related to money earned, overall rating, views and bookings and hosting standard rating. At best, these give hosts a summary of their performance, that too, in a silo. There is no way for the hosts to see how their numbers match up to their competitors.

Current view of Stats tab

In other words:

Hosts are unaware of how they or their ‘business’ (listing) is faring with respect to other listings in the local market. As a result, they don’t know if they should be doing something more or something different to improve their offering.

I found myself quite motivated to address this problem, and so I decided to do a 4-day design challenge..

User Research & Insights

I conducted user interviews with two more hosts to understand:

How do they decide on the price of their listing and the amenities they will be providing?
Why do they follow that process?
How do they assess their listing as compared to their local market and why?
In an ideal scenario, what information (about them or their competitors) do they need to make sure they provide superior services?

Based on those conversations I learned that:

Hosts only compete with their immediate competitors; other hosts in their 1 mile radius that have the same/similar property type.

Immediate Competitors: nearby hosts with the same property type

Hosts decide on pricing and amenities by studying what other hosts, with similar listings in a 1-mile radius (immediate competitors), are charging and offering. To see what they can do better, hosts would sometimes read reviews of their immediate competitors to try and see how they’re providing a superior experience.

Hosts study the pricing, amenities being offered and reviews of their immediate competitors

Design Core

Based on my findings, I chose to design an experience that would communicate to the user:

a. Where they stand with respect their immediate competitors.

b. How they can improve by showing them what their immediate competitors are doing better

Designing

Before I got my hands dirty, I decided to do a little research on the hospitality industry in the context of Airbnb. I wanted to learn more about the important KPIs used in this industry to measure performance, success and customer satisfaction. The idea was to narrow in on different kinds of data that hosts would find useful. Websites like Airdna, Learn Airbnb and Airbnb Secrets were particularly helpful in this.

Armed with my research data and design core, I started sketching. I was able to come up with 4–5 concepts, but the strongest (and the most realistic) one amongst those relied heavily on data visualisation. Therefore, it was vital that I craft data visualisation graphics that were super intuitive and decipherable within seconds. However, I got stuck. This was by far the hardest part of the entire project.

I was going and back forth with designs that had varying combinations of charts, texts and images. But none of my initial designs for data viz. felt right. So, I decided to take a step back and read up on data visualisation to better understand the popular data visualisation techniques and which one of them would best suit my need. I also looked for inspiration and analysed data visualisation techniques in some of the popular apps I use.

Exemplar Analysis: Understanding how Medium, Apple (Activity App) and Google Maps handle data visualisation

These steps helped me get out of a creative rut. After some sketching and guerrilla usability testing, I narrowed in on a design concept that best addressed the user need.

Design Proposal

For my final design, I decided to create a dedicated report page that would show hosts information related to their occupancy rate, pricing and amenities in the context of their local market. The user can access this page inside the ‘Stats’ tab itself. (Note: For this design concept, I have assumed that most hosts only list one property on Airbnb)

Once the user taps on the data viz. or ‘Details’, they are then taken to the report page. The first bit of information that they see next is about their occupancy rate. Occupancy rate here refers to the total number of days the property was occupied (rented) with respect to the total number of days it was available. I decided to include this because it is a pretty standard KPI in the hospitality industry. Plus, it gives the host an objective measurement of how in-demand they were at a given period of time. It will give them something to work towards or new targets to hit. Higher the occupancy rate, better will be the earnings/profits for both the hosts and Airbnb.

As the user scrolls down, the information they see next is about pricing. Through the frequency distribution graph, the user gets a visual representation of where they and their competitors lie in the pricing range. Below that there are contextual links to articles to help users prices their Airbnb right.

Pricing is an important parameter in judging performance because guests use prices and amenities to compare different listings in the same area. Developing a pricing strategy and being on top of it can play a crucial role in improving a host’s occupancy rates. Hence, providing feedback on the same is important.

Next, the user sees information about additional amenities that their immediate competitors (with higher occupancy rates) are offering. As mentioned above, amenities is an important parameter guests use to compare Airbnb listings. Therefore, just like pricing, it’s essential that hosts are given feedback on amenities as well.

After going through prices and amenities, the user sees information related to their ratings and reviews. During my research, I found that hosts go through the reviews and ratings of their immediate competitors to analyse the kind of experience they’re providing and if they can do something different to improve their offering. Therefore, to satisfy that use case, the users are given a list of their immediate competitors’ listing (who have higher occupancy rates).

At the end of the report page, the user will be given links to 3rd party services/blogs/articles that can help them in becoming better hosts. These suggestions will be contextual to the host’s performance and would focus on overcoming their current shortcomings.

As mentioned above, hosts see their Airbnb listing as a legitimate business opportunity and invest in them accordingly. So, it’s only fair that we provide them with more advanced tools using which they can assess where they stand in their local market and how they can improve. Not only will this make for a competitive market, but it will also raise the bar of guest’s stay experience ultimately resulting in more profits for the hosts and Airbnb. It’s a win-win situation.

I don’t work for Airbnb (though I’d love to) and so I am not aware of their business and technical constraints. Therefore, I would love to know your thoughts on where this concept might break or if it has the potential to become something big. Please feel free to comment and voice your opinions. And, as always, if you have any feedback/suggestion/critique, please to write to me at rishabh.ux@gmail.com. I look forward to hearing from you all.

Helping Airbnb Hosts Fare Better (Design Concept) was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Helping Airbnb Hosts Fare Better (Design Concept)

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