Key takeaways from Airbnb’s winter UX/UI redesign
Airbnb is not like most software companies.
They only release major changes twice a year, much like Apple. As a result, anything new they announce is the product of months of careful planning, thought, and testing.
Furthermore, they have had two renowned designers on their team since 2021: Jony Ive and Hiroki Asai. Both of them played important roles as Apple executives under Steve Jobs.
I'm a big admirer of Airbnb and was interested in Jony and Hiroki's work, so I studied their Winter 2023 product release for hours. I've read press releases, listened to Brian Chesky's perspective, and watched hosts discuss the launch on YouTube.
The following three crucial lessons really stuck with me:
The returns of great design: elegant decisions for big pain points
More than 450,000.
That is the total number of tech professionals laid off between 2021 and the present.
Design teams must be highly skilled at communicating the likely outcomes of their choices in such dire situation. Trust and simplicity of use are well-established, measurable conversion factors that can serve as selling points for design choices.
The most recent release of Airbnb demonstrates how excellent designers may create straightforward fixes for the two main problems.
Designing for trust — the Guest Favorite category
Their study team discovered that a major barrier to their experience was trust and reliability.
When visitors arrived at a home, they were met with a number of unexpected surprises, such as discovering that the "dedicated workspace" was simply a little table on a dirty corner. There is the advertised hot tub, however it's broken.
In light of this, the objective shifts to how to resolve the issue of establishing confidence at scale. The clever solution to that problem was to introduce a new host tier known as Guest Favourites.
The update appeared in two places on the user interface:
Designing for ease of use — organising the listings tab
Brian believes that excellent hosts are essential for a fantastic end user experience. You must give your hosts excellent tools if you want them to be great hosts. And that was not at all how the Airbnb listing process went.
Brian demonstrates in the launch video how difficult it was to locate and utilize the portion.
What's fascinating is that they didn't necessarily have to completely redesign the app to find a solution. The problem was resolved with:
It's not simple to accomplish, but the result is a significantly improved experience thanks to a streamlined design. They made things function, gave priority to what made sense, and concealed less-used elements.
According to a host,“It’s going to make sure that you as a host are able to update your listing more easily. You’re definitely going to get more bookings with a properly filled out listing”.
Better listings, more bookings, more revenues for Airbnb. Proper results-driven design.
The end of flat design?
When the most design driven of the Fortune 500 CEOs talk about design trends, we listen:
“By the way, the design is a whole new aesthetic. I’d like to make the announcement that I think flat design is over or ending. I think if you remember the 2000s were dominated by skeuomorphism.
The 2010s have been dominated with the launch of iOS seven by flat design. And I think we’re going to move back into a world with colour, texture, dimensionality, more haptic feedback, but I don’t think it’s going to be skeuomorphism where it pretends to be a wood grain to reference a dashboard or leather, but I think it’s going to have a sense of dimension.”
His thesis is that we’re spending more time on screens, so we want them to have some elements of a natural environment. The new paradigm of design welcomes playfulness, texture, and lightness.
Additionally, he makes the case that AI can help develop these kinds of more interactive interfaces.
Although a professional artist most likely created Airbnb's icons, AI may certainly produce something alike. I tried to replicate one of their Mid Journey icons in order to test that.
Here’s what I got:
I’d say that’s close enough.
Simplicity isn’t going anywhere. Actually, the majority of the Airbnb app is really simple to use and places a strong emphasis on clarity. Their brand's colours are only sparingly employed, and their navigation is easy to understand.
However, it's possible that a fresh approach to design is emerging.
Leveraging AI for ease of use
Another issue they found was that people just weren’t using the photo tour feature (around 10% did).
Since photo tours are better organised than the standard sequence of images, it made for worse listings overall. And a bad listing might mean the factor that makes a person decide to go for the certainty of a hotel instead.
The solution they chose was very interesting: using AI to sort the images automatically and reduce the work needed from the host. That brought the user flow of adding and sorting images down to one single click. Massively better experience.
As a side note, it’s interesting to see how they leverage Labor Illusion. Labour Illusion is a psychological principle that states that people value things more when they see the work behind them. Airbnb “shows the work” that AI is doing through a reshuffling animation.
Market leaders, as the owners of data and large pockets, will be expected to use AI smartly. As the Innovator's Dilemma tells us, it’s unlikely to expect it will be used in a completely disruptive way, but it sure should bring their products to the next level.
Airbnb’s photo tour is a great example of that.
AI is not in the background, nor is it at the forefront of the product, but users can clearly see how it’s making it better.