Service Design Project for Airbnb

RC
Mar 19, 2023
3 min read

Updated: Dec 4, 2023

This is a group service design project to improve the service process of Airbnb. As a service designer, our group put ourselves into international travelers' shoes, designing new services for Airbnb users to provide them with a better living experience.

Why Airbnb?

As a popular booking application for living, Airbnb has more affordable lodging options, for it used to be cheaper than the hotel. And compared with hotels, Airbnb can provide a private space for people, can let people interact with the host, and some of the experiential services can encourage people to experience the local culture. Besides, some of the Airbnb housing has a very unique architecture and interesting interior design.

Value Exchange Visualization

Since we decided to improve Airbnb's services, we started to analyze its value exchange. There is a triangular core relationship between Airbnb, Customers, and Hosts. The diagram shows other key entities that are impacted by the presence of Airbnb in a community - including local businesses, residences, social media, and utility providers. We've identified that some value exchanges may be positive or negative.

Airbnb current state Journey Map

Based on the value exchange, we create a character named Cus Tomer, who loves traveling with friends. We record his journey: planning the trip, booking an Airbnb house, checking in at Airbnb, staying in Airbnb, checking out, and leaving. Throughout his journey, he has a lot of actions and various emotions as well as needs. And we also find out about Airbnb's pain points, touchpoints, and opportunities.

Airbnb current state service blueprint

With Cus's experience in Airbnb, we want to analyze the process from check-in to check-out. Thus we design the service blueprint to show how Airbnb handles Cus's stay experience.

Through the blueprint, we found that messaging and communication are the keys to almost all aspects of a stay at an Airbnb. Nevertheless, throughout the process of staying in Airbnb, there are many touch points and opportunities among there, but they all depend on what the host can offer. Also, hosts have an overwhelming number of decisions to make, and they take the burden of setting up a new Airbnb to solve out a lot of work.

Research

With this background research and current state analysis, we can do research to know more about Airbnb. For our research plan, we try to use three methods: Contextual interviews, Secondary research, and In-depth interviews. Putting these methods to the three different actors: Hosts, Guests, and backstage employees respectively.

Due to the difficulties of interviewing with backstage employees, we changed our mind and make interviews with Airbnb guests. And here are the questions with Airbnb hosts and guests:

Interview questions with Airbnb Hosts:

What made you/ Why did you want to try hosting an Airbnb?
Why Airbnb over other similar services?
What was your experience like setting up your listing?
What was it like setting up the check-in/ check-out process?
How did you learn to improve your service/listing?
(When &) why did you hire a cleaning service?
When you become a host in Airbnb, is the Airbnb team will give you some instruction? (how do you contact their team members?)
What matters most to you as an Airbnb host?
Do you think about the ratings? If so, how does it influence you?
What type of advice would you give a new Airbnb host?
In what ways do you think Airbnb could improve? Why?
Is there anything Airbnb could offer/provide hosts with to better the experience?
What makes you continue to use Airbnb?

Interview questions with Airbnb Guests:

By doing the series of research, we gain a lot of replies and answers on that, and we make affinity maps by collecting the key points through interviews and secondary data.

With these row data, we do the affinity map, categorizing them by the important service parts in Airbnb, and concise our "How Might We" questions.

Ideation

Based on these "How Might We" questions, we think about the ideas of improving them well and list various ideations on these parts:

Then, we chose this method because our ideas were focused on the value creation generated between hosts and guests, which can be difficult to measure or grade on a numerical scale required by the other methods. This also allowed us to visualize and see similarities between the ideas that were considered 'quick wins' and instigated conversations in our team. We discussed why these ideas were considered to have a similar level of impact. As a result, we ended up ideating some more from cross-pollinating our ideas of similar levels of user value.

With the matrix, we think of three prioritized concepts:

Improving Airbnb App to be a more proactive facilitator

Several of our ideas are about reminders and preferences of both hosts and guests to avoid unnecessary friction and tension between strangers. This interaction can be improved and mediated by Airbnb by simply adding a feature to see social, cultural, and travel purpose preferences. These prior expectations can decrease a lot of nerves and anxieties for all involved in a stay.

Mini Crisis Management Plan

Transparency of costs

Persona

To visualize our prioritized concepts, we keep using Cus Tomer for our persona, but we detail his characteristic and experiences:

Name: Cus Tomer

Age: 24

From: Seattle, WA

Personal Characteristics: Comfortable with tech, a little awkward at socializing in-person

A big fan of the music festival.

Job: Software Engineer at Amazon

College: University of Washington, B.S. in Computer Science

Languages: English (and non-existent Spanish)

Goals: to attend Summer Sonic 2023 Music Festival (August 19th-20th)

Location: Seattle, USA - Osaka, Japan

Tasks: He needs to arrive in Osaka on August 18th. He has to book Airbnb for 3 people at affordable prices. The stay should be near to the venue to avoid transportation cost.