Overview
Spending 48 hours to create a new solution for Airbnb to allow travelers to stay connected during the pandemic, we came up with a new 'shared story' format for user to document their travels. This allows all members of the experience to provide their perspectives and encourage sharing.
Roles
Product Designer, Motion Designer
Team
Jenny Tran, Kylie To
Tools
Adobe XD, Photoshop
Type
Design Challenge
Timeline
48 Hours
Problem Statement
How might we empower Airbnb users to share and plan their travels?
The problem statement was quite open ended, stipulating the need for ease of use and the ability for all members of the family to contribute their thoughts and experiences.
We decided that our approach would be to tackle the issue by creating a stand-alone app for travelers to share their experiences while also providing social engagement features for sharing and tying them back to properties in Airbnb.
The initial brainstorm
Research
From this point on, our focus was on coming up with a format that would be easy to use, while also fitting in with best mobile practices. We also worked towards interviewing other people and seeing how they used apps to help with their traveling experience.
In total, we were able to interview over 10 people from different age categories and demographics, ranging in level of experience in traveling.
A series of questions and assumptions that we made during the research process
User Personas
Using the research that we gathered, we were able to put together 2 quick personas to represent that people that we invisioned using a platform like this.
Jason
Jason is a 21 year old college student who loves to travel. He’s a regular user of Airbnb because he finds it easy to discover new accommodation options. During his trips, he’s always taking pictures with his friends and tagging them in large albums on social media platforms.
Jason also loves reading traveler’s blogs and their experiences traveling with friends. He wishes that he can make content like that on his own, without needing to learn complicated design tools.
Sandra
Sandra is a 39 year old mother of 2. She likes taking family vacations to spend quality time together. As her two kids are still young, she wants to help preserve their memories. They have started scrapbooking as a way to allow them to participate in the documentation process.
As they have done a lot of things together already, Sally is looking for inspiration for new activities that they can do together. She also wants be able to easily share new experiences and activities with her friends.
Rough Mockups
Perspectives
We decided to try a new approach with stories, incorporating the simple idea of being able to swipe left and right through content with a new feature: perspectives.
The content would be grouped in a series of up to 10 chapters. Each chapter would consist of a tile, a media item, a location, and a caption. Underneath, any person that took part in the trip would be able to add in their own media and comments; hence adding their perspective.
A rough wireframe of the core feature of the application, Memories
The Solution
Airbnb Memories
Our solution consisted of 3 main features.
- The ability to explore your friends and public memories
- A collaborative editing tool to allow all users regardless of age to contribute their perspectives
- Memories, a simple narrative based medium to document experiences that is simple to use and share with others
Explore feed including smart recommendations
Collaborative editing experience with contextual recommendations
Intuitive Memory story format, featuring Perspectives
Conclusion
48 hours of planning, researching, and designing led to an amazing experience creating this concept. I was able to learn a lot about participating in my first design competition and how to format my thinking in the face of a design challenge!
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