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Venue Booking

Conceptual Feature Integration: Book and plan your event with Airbnb

CLIENT
Conceptual design done for "Airbnb" as part of a General Assembly project

THE ASK

Airbnb would like to create a first-class means to increase the ability of event hosts and guests to find one another through its mobile app

REFINED PROBLEM
Users find the event planning process time-consuming and stressful

GOAL & TIMING

Help guests to efficiently find and book event-appropriate venues and help venues hosts find guests.

Timeline: 2 weeks

Platform: Native iOS App

MY ROLE

Research

Data Analysis

Ideation

Testing

Lead the UI and prototype Design

Getting to Know the Users

SCREENER SURVEY
We sent out a screener survey to find Airbnb users who are or had been either guests, hosts (or both) and recruit them for interviews.


USER INTERVIEWS
We decided to focus our research on guest users since they constituted 98.7% of our 99 responses. We interviewed 9 active Airbnb users to learn more about how they plan and book events and their experience with Airbnb.

What Did We Learn?

USER INTERVIEW INSIGHTS

  • Our users were planning for a very specific type of event (i.e.: Professional or personal)
     

  • Users wanted more venue information available online
     

  • Users wanted the ability to visualize venues without visiting them (Virtual Tour, 360˚ photos/videos, space layout)
     

  • Users wanted to track venues they like (Bookmark/Favorite)
     

  • Users wanted the ability to efficiently search and find suitable venues (Filter by interests).

2 personas.png
Problem Statement

Users planning events are busy and usually search for venues online or get recommendations from people they know. Users find the event planning process time-consuming and stressful.


How might we help users to efficiently find and book event-appropriate venues?

Ideating Solutions

DESIGN STUDIO

This is a resourceful method that generates design ideas through rapid sketches, iteration and collaboration in a group settings. We ran two rounds of Design Studio and at the end of the process we listed all the potential features that could  solve our personas' pain points.

Design Studio
Feature Prioritization

MoSCoW


Once we had the list of potential features, we prioritize which ones were going to be included in the app using the MoSCow method. We believed the following features could potentially solve our user’s problems.

Building & Testing Prototype

ANNOTATION

1. Added venues on app's home screen (Entry point)

2. Promoting venues through sponsored stories (Business goal)

3. Robust Filtering

4. Allow venues find guests based on similar interests (Business goal)

5. Venue Promotion (Business goal)

6. Bookmark

7. Detailed list of amenities and attributes

Usability Test

We tested the paper prototype on two users, but we realized major iterations were needed to make the experience easier for the users. These are the results after conducting 5 additional tests, with some iterations in between:

TESTING RESULTS

[7/7] Found a venue they liked [Task 1]
[6/7] Bookmarked it [Task 2]

[7/7] Contacted the venue host [Task 3]

[6/7] Clicked “Book Now” instead of “Contact Host” to contact host

[7/7] “Scrolled” through multimedia gallery

Key Design Decisions

USER & BUSINESS GOALS

DESIGN SOLUTIONS

Help users to efficiently find and book event-appropriate venues

Include venue details/amenities/extra costs as well as price range shown on venue page. Robust filtering options

Allow guests to remotely visualize venue space, and save time

Provide 360º multimedia, online walk-through, guided tour, Space Layout Map

[BG] Allow venues spaces to find guests based on their shared interests

Guest give permission to be contacted by venues based on their search criteria

[BG] Allow venues to promote their spaces

Promoting venues through sponsored stories. Feature promoted venues at the top of results page

Next Steps

  • Agree upon KPIs with stakeholders so we have more ways to measure results.

  • Run more usability tests on High Fidelity Prototype.

  • Further develop Venue Promotions through sponsored content and “stories”.

  • Interview Venue Hosts.

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