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AIRBNB EVENT ALERTS
Have you ever booked a trip and thought you had planned everything to a T — what to eat, where to stay, how to get around — only to get there and find your plans thwarted because of an unexpected situation or event? We’ve all been there.
Although never entirely avoidable, it’s a problem that sparked my curiosity. I began to think about it through the lens of Airbnb, an online marketplace for homestays, since it’s an app I use frequently as both a guest for booking travel and a source of income as a host.
With multiple learnings and pivots along the way, I worked with a team on a design process which led us to create Airbnb Event Alerts, a feature that provides alerts for upcoming local and notable events happening nearby rental properties.
Let’s take a look!
Client: Airbnb (General Assembly Class Project)
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Team: Leah Prickett and Rivka Kleiner
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Tools: Figma, Slack, Google Drive, Google Slides, Zoom
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Role: UX Researcher/Designer
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Date: May 30th -June 15th 2023
After discussing our pain points with booking travel, we hypothesized that Airbnb needs a new and efficient way to keep users informed about notable events.
To find out more, we conducted 6 interviews with users about their planning processes, booking preferences, and overall experiences around travel.
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After sythesizing our data using affinity mapping, we discovered that users found large-scale public events affect pricing, traffic and availability.
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We then conducted competitive and comparative analysis of VRBO, Waze, Marketmaker, Eventbrite and local city tourism websites. We found that:
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If there’s a large-scale event, holiday, or overall busy time in an area, Airbnb provides surge pricing alerts to hosts, but not guests, and doesn’t provide information about why
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Official city tourism websites and apps like Eventbrite effectively use calendar features to communicate notable events
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Apps like Waze and Marketmaker provide helpful, real-time data collected from user input​
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PROBLEM
How can we incorporate a new feature that gives guests more information to better plan their trips? And on the flip side, how can we make it easier for hosts to better know how to adjust their prices?
SOLUTION
Develop an appealing and functional feature that will provide ahead-of-time alerts about events to both guests and hosts.
User Personas
Incorporating our research, we created 3 personas that would best represent our users
DESIGN
The team collaborated in a Design Studio to flesh out our ideas.
Strong themes emerged, such as incorporating a calendar and map, creating new iconography/emojis in the airbnb style, and implementing UI cards for individual events, which were then used to develop wireflows.
After the prototype was complete, we conducted usability testing on 9 different subjects, including a SUS evaluation, which received an 81.
We observed our users complete a variety of tasks, and discovered that they
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Desired the alerts to happen earlier in the booking process
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Were unclear about the type and scope of events, and where that information came from
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Had difficulty finding the alerts through the host dashboard
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Found the significance of the “flame” emoji confusing (intended to suggest a busy time)
From these results we agreed to reiterate on our designs by
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Implementing alert notifications earlier in the booking process
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Clarifying the type of events, specifically their magnitude, significance, and source
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Changing the “flame” emoji to a “ticket” emoji
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Re-ordering the host flow
NEXT STEPS
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To continue the project, we would further iterate on our ideas using information gathered from user testing by
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Changing the bell notification icon to be more prominent
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Adding a host calendar feature
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Adding extra notifications
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Adding a heart (like/favorite feature) to event UI cards