The Airbnb Design Sprint was both a lesson and hands-on project that involved a mixture of teamwork and individual design skills.
Unlike the standard design sprint (normally a five day process), ours was spread across one day every week allowing us to explore and understand the importance of each step. Design groups of 6 were formed for this process.
We started the sprint off by finding opportunity within Airbnb. We noticed that senior citizens had become the fastest growing demographic of home-sharing for Airbnb. And while their guest growth had expanded, the average traveler's age was 35 years old.
So we asked ourselves:
"How might we encourage older generations to become Airbnb guests?"
This became our starting point to find potential problems that Airbnb faced.
Framing the journey of a senior citizen traveling with Airbnb for the first time.
Based off of the journey map we were able to find pain points and opportunities for improvement by asking questions.
Airbnb realies heavily on the trust and communication between its guests and hosts in order to succeed. Some of the challenges that come up are:
As a group we ideated on potential solutions and narrowed them down to a direction we believed could aid in improving trust and communication between guests and hosts. Our focus was to utilize the trips feature that Airbnb recently introduced.
We found potential in improving the Trips page as it was only offering the ability of viewing past trips, when you had checked in, which Airbnb reservation you had, and when you checked out.
Case One: Adding flight information