No time to explain, it’s the best time to rent a room in Eastern Europe. In this series of articles, I do a quick website review, where I discuss three flowchart aspects such as onboarding, killer features and dark patterns. Today, we are going to focus on Airbnb. Without further ado, let’s get into it.
#1 — Listing a property
This video was made by pageflows.com and shows you a full process in details
What’s good?
This process is not just nice and smooth, but it is user-oriented in the first place. If there was a race opposed to the Vogons in Douglas Adams's books, they would have invented Airbnb.
What I've learned?
- Indeed, the devil is in the details. If the process - its sequence and form - wasn't so comprehensive and consistent, no one would be able to go through it.
- Never underestimate the copy. It puts any user experience into a context.
- You shouldn’t expect the users to generate great content themselves.
User flow
#2 — Booking a room
This video was made by pageflows.com and shows you a full process in details.
What’s good?
Airbnb is a brilliant example of how complex things can be made simple and how trust overcomes fears. How did they do it? By understanding natural social biases and good design. In their well-designed app, a high reputation beats high similarity with the review system.
Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb, bet his whole company on the belief that people can trust each other enough to stay in one another's homes. How did he overcome the stranger-danger bias? Through good design.
Where to study human biases in design
- MIT’s 3 month Master’s Design program;
- Murtuza N Shergadwala’s and Jitesh Panchal’s Human Inductive Biases in Design Decision Making;
- John Jablonski’s wonderful Laws of UX website;
- Our Design Glossary, a collection of best practices to improve your design according to human behavior principles or biases.
What I've learned?
- The user goals are what we are after, not our own. To understand them, you need to conduct a detailed study.
- A robust solution for finding data on user-generated content isn’t always a classical search method.
- Learn from cognitive biases.
User flow
#3 — Deleting your account
This video was made by pageflows.com and shows you a full process in details.
What’s good?
The process is fast and transparent. I love that users can choose if they want to be contacted to give feedback instead of taking a long survey. Users always have something to say, but they’re not always provided with a convenient way to communicate.
What I've learned?
- Custom ways to communicate with your users are more than just great.
User flow
Outro
Sure, nothing’s perfect, and there is always a pain point that leads to frustration. But at least in my quick review, I did not find anything really wrong with Airbnb. I hope you’ve picked up a couple of tricks and found some inspiration in this post.