Airbnb Group Travel Experience
🚨 Problem
Planning group trips can be challenging due to varying preferences, budgets, and the time-consuming task of coordinating schedules, finding agreeable accommodations, and booking arrangements.
💡 Solution
This experience proposal for Airbnb focused on addressing the frustration of planning and traveling in groups on the Airbnb Application through the use of user centered design principles.
💼 Roles: UX Designer, Researcher
⌛ Timeline: 4 months
👥 Team Members
Anna Nuggehalli, Hastin Bagewadi, & Vincy Mehta
🥊 Impact
Expands user base and increases conversion rate by promoting group bookings
“I see my friends and I instantly using this!”
User Interviews
Conducted six user interviews to uncover pain points and friction in group trip planning, identifying key factors that discourage participation.
Focused questions on six key themes:
planning group trips
accommodation preferences
recent group travel experience
expense division and challenges
airbnb’s role in group travel
technology and group travel
1. How often do you participate in group travel experiences?
2. What are your primary considerations when organizing or participating in group trips?
3. Can you describe the types of accommodations you tend to choose when traveling with a group?
4. What factors influence your decision when selecting accommodations for group trips?
5. Could you share a recent group travel experience you were part of? What were the most challenging aspects of planning and coordination during that trip?
6. How did you and your group members communicate and collaborate when planning and booking this trip?
7. When traveling with a group, how do you typically split expenses, such as accommodations, activities, and meals? Have you encountered any difficulties in managing shared expenses?
8. In your opinion, how could Airbnb improve the experience of planning and booking trips for groups?
9. Do you find it essential to have a shared itinerary and a centralized place for trip details when traveling with a group? What advantages do you see in having such a feature on a platform like Airbnb?
10. Have you had positive experiences using technology or specific apps/platforms for planning and coordinating group travel? Could you share any lessons or insights from these experiences that Airbnb could learn from?
Research Synthesis
Comprehensively reviewed our findings from user interviews, market research, and a competitive analysis, identifying five key themes that reveal significant opportunities for innovation and growth in group trip planning on Airbnb.
🛒 Market gap
Airbnb's competitors lack a dedicated collaboration feature for group trip planning, presenting a market gap.
📥 User-centered recommendations
Involve tailored suggestions and features promoting communication, collaboration, and group discounts.
💵 Expense Management
Complexities in group trip planning, including discussions and documentation, underscore challenges.
💪 Playing to strengths
Airbnb’s large user base and user-friendly platform has the potential to lead in group trip planning.
💬 Coordinating group trips is complex
Effective collaboration is critical to reach a consensus on accommodations, activities, and budget.
TL;DR
No online platform assists in group trip planning despite a sizable market. Integrating this feature into Airbnb can create a competitive advantage, seamlessly enhancing the user journey.
Personas and Use Cases
Storyboarding
Vincy Mehta and I each created a storyboard to showcase seamless integration of the application into different scenarios. My storyboard focused on decision making, emphasizing the need for a voting function to streamline bookings process.
How Might We…
optimize group trips by improving coordination, expense management, collaboration, and expense tracking?
Designing the Product
Identified essential trip components and critical information for users, focusing on the user journey and key solution mechanisms.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Generated low fidelity wireframes focused on visualizing the essential tasks for users to complete.
Group communication via chat
Decision making through voting mechanism
Track expenses for various aspects of the trip.
Mid Fidelity Wireframes
Created mid fidelity wireframes that aligned with airbnb’s design guidelines and experience.
Heuristic Evaluation
Conducted a heuristic evaluation using Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics.
User flow is disconnected and unintuitive
Navigation does not lend itself to outlined features
Unclear visual hierarchy makes screens difficult to skim
Inputs are not optimized for simplest user experience
Prototype
Created high-fidelity wireframes prioritizing user flow, integration, and interaction based on heuristic evaluation findings. Developed a prototype for usability testing to refine the user experience.
Usability Testing
Conducted think-aloud usability test with four adults unfamiliar with the project to assess the overall usability and learning involved for the experience.
👓 Visibility and Accessibility
Enhance visibility for key elements like the login button, search results, navigation menu, account settings, profile editing, and messaging feature.
🔎 Search, Filtering, and Refinements
Address improvements for search results, filters, and refinements, including simplified filters and the option to save favorites.
🎨 Design and Responsiveness
Prioritize maintaining a user-friendly, visually appealing design based on positive feedback regarding the clean, modern design and responsiveness across devices.
📋 Onboarding and Guidance
Improve onboarding clarity with additional tooltips, validate required fields in the sign-up form, and enhance overall user experience.
🗣️ Booking Process and Communication
Provide a clear booking confirmation page, streamline checkout steps, improve the intuitive process for canceling reservations, and enhance messaging feature visibility and reliability.
High Fidelity Wireframes
Made final adjustments to the design to address concerns discovered during the last stage of testing.
Create a Group Trip
Users navigate Airbnb as usual, selecting their destination and travel dates. In the "Who is Coming" section, they can input details about each member, forming a group for the trip. Additionally, users can establish budgets and other trip constraints during setup.
Trip Information
Users experience a dynamic trip information page that adapts throughout the planning and execution process. Before booking accommodations, they can view saved options and recommended activities from group members.
Messaging, Voting, & Booking
The enhanced group travel experience initiates a group trip chat automatically, ensuring seamless communication among all members. The messaging feature includes a voting mechanism for deciding on accommodations and activities. Once a decision is reached, booking is just a tap away.
Expense Reporting
One of the primary challenges of group trips is managing expenses. Airbnb simplifies this by enabling users to effortlessly log expenses, split them among trip members, and facilitate in-app payments between users.
Reflection
Iterative Design
The Airbnb collaboration feature underwent usability tests, revealing insights on visibility, accessibility, and clarity issues. Users identified problems in login, navigation, search, and reservation processes. While praising the modern design, users requested improved functionality like saving favorites and search filters. The iterative design process incorporates user feedback for continuous improvement, emphasizing the importance of refining the feature for a more user-centric experience on the Airbnb platform.
Mastery of UCD
This project immersed me in the realm of user experience design, providing an opportunity to delve into unexplored principles of user-centered design. Beyond comprehending user needs, it taught me the art of empathizing with users and effectively conveying that understanding to project stakeholders using personas, scenarios, storyboards, and more.
Presentation Deck
Presented a comprehensive overview of our design process and showcased the final user experience.