Designing for a changing world

Inside our mission to revamp the product for shifting consumer needs

Fast facts:

  • Airbnb consumer behavior has shifted and inspired production changes
  • Frontline Stays, Monthly Stays, and Online Experiences were launched
  • Lessons were learned well-nigh evolving product while beingness more nimble

Community and connection are central to the Airbnb make, and existence mission-driven means that we blueprint for a globe where social inclusion and trust is at the heart of everything nosotros do. This conventionalities in the power of belonging drives our production innovation and touches every attribute of the campaigns nosotros ship to a world of hosts and travelers in 220 countries.

Although barriers to belonging have e'er existed, the current landscape has forced usa to lean on pattern thinking to accost the new means in which our community uses our platform. It's besides helped us diversify our product offerings in unexpected ways, allowing the states to design for inclusion and create better products for those we serve. Read on to discover how nosotros're addressing this unprecedented challenge the Airbnb way.

Assessing a radically altered earth

With travel at a standstill from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, Airbnb faces a very different consumer landscape from the one in which belonging and travel went mitt-in-mitt. The COVID-19 crisis has left vast populations unemployed and shelter-in-place orders accept required an estimated 1.7 billion members of guild to quarantine at home.

In this new reality, we've observed three key ways in which consumer behavior has shifted:

  1. Frontline professionals accept special needs: With caregivers around the globe risking their lives to protect others, cocky-isolation from their families is fundamental.
  2. Travel and physical connection are on break: With more than 100 countries worldwide enacting social distancing measures, people are unable to share their love of hospitality and travel.
  3. Airbnb visitors are searching for longer-term housing: Many guests are looking for monthly accommodations due to travel guidelines and a variety of safety needs.

 A earlier and after of the Airbnb homepage.

Mapping out relevant product solutions

It's no surprise that these radical behavior shifts on our platform have impacted all aspects of our business. To accost them, a cantankerous-functional team banded together from product, localization, design, policy and engineering science. We knew our response had to be rapid and nimble in a world where remote collaboration was the new norm.

In nether three weeks, our squad mapped out a few timely product solutions:

Stays for frontline workers: Inspired by a community of hosts who were willing to open their doors, Frontline Stays was born. With its launch, nosotros worked with our host community to offer comfortable and user-friendly places to stay to first responders (including healthcare staff) and their families in need of accommodation.

Heartened past the incredible generosity of our hosts, we wanted to offer a solution that allows medical staff to stay near their patients and still be safely distanced from their families. And of class, cleanliness was top-of-mind: eligible hosts have agreed to follow a rigorous checklist before and afterward each stay, with 72 hours between guests. In doing so, we leveraged and scaled the empty inventory on our platform while allowing starting time responders to keep a safe altitude from their families and loved ones.

Virtual community for a world on lockdown: In partnership with hosts from around the globe, Online Experiences was launched to allow people to connect despite their separation. Guests tin now attend a tango concert with a Latin Grammy nominee or melt alongside a Moroccan family in an intimate setting. And hosts like Nonna Nerina —an 84-year-old grandma who one time shared her family unit'southward pasta recipes with guests in the physical world—take made the leap to cooking classes in the virtual i. This has allowed our guests to connect while in quarantine and has provided much-needed income for hosts.

Shifting the concept of home: As the world continues to shelter in identify and experience economical disruption, we believe we can be of service to guests effectually the earth who still need places to stay. Inspired past the search behavior on our site trending towards longer stays, we built an easy way for hosts to have longer stays—which eighty% of hosts have accepted—and launched a new monthly stays search choice, enabling guests to easily find comfortable and affordable homes for a month or longer.

Left to right: Generous hosts from Guadalajara, Nairobi, Milwaukee, Mexico City, & Kingdom of cambodia share their space for Frontline Stays.

Three key blueprint challenges

With limited resources, remote teams, and a irresolute global landscape information technology was necessary to evolve our internal processes and lens on product development to create the well-nigh significant homepage redesign we've worked on in recent years.

Claiming #one: Developing relevant design solutions that were both regional and global

During a time when nearly every population effectually the earth was struggling at varying levels of crunch in different fourth dimension zones—creating relevant design solutions was never more paramount. Travel guidance from various sources was continually changing, governmental regulations were too in flux.

1 of our primary goals was to communicate apace and accurately with our customs, in each host and guest's preferred linguistic communication to ensure rubber and inclusion were prioritized. In order to revamp the Airbnb homepage to address these challenges, the team was hyper-focused on ensuring information technology met the disquisitional needs of our hosts and guests.

To accomplish this, nosotros adapted on multiple levels:

Modular merchandising: The new homepage was redesigned for modularity, enabling usa to rapidly customize information technology for the needs of our customs in various regions worldwide. Both the homepage and the app were updated to marshal with our current brand messaging while making navigation easier to discover for key product updates in a higher place the fold.

Messaging crafted for the community: Connecting authentically with hosts and guests around the earth requires a massive localization effort. In less challenging times, we translate content into 62 languages with a normal turnaround time of 72 hours.With policy changes shifting every day, that timeframe wasn't going to cut information technology. Our localization squad quickly instituted a new procedure which reduced translation fourth dimension from 72 hours to 6 hours.

Content teams also built a new lexicon as the virus spread. For example, the Airbnb Writing team had to make the shift from "Coronavirus" to "COVID-19," and reverberate that development everywhere inside the production. Our teams also worked alongside partners from Legal and other departments to create extensive new language guidelines that were both tactical and trauma-informed.

Challenge #2: Crafting a nimble product evolution process during unprecedented times

How do you collaborate and produce compelling creative work when the usual tools of fourth dimension, budget, brief, and man contact aren't readily at your disposal?

Cantankerous-functional teams leaned into Airbnb'southward existing collaborative environment, and  began working  equally a unmarried unit, to deliver quickly on urgent projects. Nosotros leaned difficult on tools like Figma to speed upwardly stakeholder alignment. In response to slow Internet bandwidth, artistic team members working on our Online Experiences launch experimented with analog methods of file sharing—like biking across San Francisco to enable a artistic producer to Airdrop host footage to their phone. Since fourth dimension was a luxury we didn't have, we learned how to produce without production and share toolkits instead of customized components for design.

This moment in fourth dimension has also taught us new and surprising lessons about on-the-wing product. For example, nosotros're experimenting with filmmakers and photographers creating content within their homes, using their family members equally models. In this extraordinary time, finding new ways of making up for product shortfalls has enabled us to continue generating quality piece of work.

Claiming # three: Accost gaps in our electric current systems, product, tools, and processes

There was no playbook for handling a crunch that occurred in most every country around the world simultaneously. We used this equally an opportunity to innovate and update our existing protocols. For instance, at the beginning of the crisis, the squad was not prepared to handle content creation at the speed of changing information. COVID-xix challenged the systems we had in place for updating UI/UX content like banners, a formerly cumbersome organisation that required high-affect polish from engineers, QA staff, and others. We needed to get more nimble and so the team now manages them in our new CMS that can publish targeted content to specific locales.

As policies shifted, the localization squad reduced turnaround time from 72 hours to six so they could speak to communities around the world in their language.

What nosotros've learned:

We've adapted our platform to come across the changing needs of our guests and hosts; we have fabricated meaning pattern updates for what our community needs now. In this new era of limited travel, nosotros've relied on a design-axial approach to diversify and adapt our business concern internally and externally. We've all been forced to think similar designers. Doing and so has impacted our internal processes and opened our optics to a few valuable lessons.

An evolved product has redefined success: Before COVID-19 became a daily struggle, a booking between a guest and host was a symbol of success. Just in this unprecedented time, designing for a unique set of incentives has made values-based decision-making ever more than critical.

More nimble product and campaign development is key: The crisis has forced us to become more adaptable and improve our tools. Production constraints and shorter timelines accept pushed u.s. to detect new ways to address challenges and launch our products and campaigns.

The takeaway:

At Airbnb, our beloved for design trouble solving is well-documented: information technology drives our culture, it's how we build our teams , it's the way we connect with a earth of travelers. And it turns out that our value for design might be even more relevant in a globe where ingenious solutions are ever more than necessary.

Stay tuned for more deep dives on creating during crisis. We'll share insights from content writers, architects, product designers and others across the organisation.

To learn more virtually our efforts to back up our host community, visit the Airbnb Newsroom .

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