Project: Airbnb - Rewards Program Implementation
Duration:
3 weeks
Team members:
Zoe Gage
Matthew Rumancik
Sophia Kim
Tools:
Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Context
With Airbnb’s mission of imagining new possibilities for people through community and a sense of belonging, we discovered an opportunity to combat overly expensive booking fees charged by Airbnb and identified ways to improve the overall user experience through loyalty rewards and benefits.
Problem
Individuals who do not regularly choose Airbnb need to be rewarded for their bookings to incentivize continued use and attract new users.
Understanding our Competition
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Started with an air mattress in a living room in 2008 as Airbed & Breakfast.
Became “Airbnb” in March 2009
Became profitable in 2016
Went public on the NYSE December 2020
Over 4 million hosts and 2 million guests per day
Only 8,611 employees
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• First hotel in the world was built in 705 (Japan)
• Luxury hotels launched and expanded in the 1800’s
• Now, there are over 700,000 hotels globally with over 15.5 million rooms.
• Marriott International is the largest global chain with 30 brands and over 14,000 rooms
• Over 160 million Marriott BonVoy members.
To start our research (discover phase) we explored the history behind Airbnb and the hotel industry. We wanted to better understand the creation and intent behind Airbnb to position ourselves accurately against their business goals and also gain insight into the hotel industry to comprehend the impact that they had in travel and lodging. We researched popular reward program at companies such as Delta, Amtrak, Starbucks, Marriott and IHG to compare their benefit functionalities, UI, business models and tier programs.
Status Tier: What are they and how many are there?
Home Screen: Can you book via rewards?
Product Purchase Page: How can you use the rewards?
Logged-in Membership Overview Page: What does the UI look like on their site?
Understanding our Users
In order to get a deeper understand of reward programs and Airbnb users, we interviewed reward benefit participants and gathered our results.
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Reward Benefits
What benefits and rewards programs are you a part of?
How long have you been using that program?
What stands out the most to you in terms of rewards programs?
How are you rewarded for your usage? Do you feel adequately rewarded?
Have you seen that program evolve over the years?
What have you liked or not liked about the changes they have made?
What do you like about the current program interface/program options when you are logged in?
What are the biggest areas of opportunity (what would you change) about the current program?
You are looking to book a vacation and need a place to stay, can you talk me through the steps you take to achieve this?
Airbnb Experience
Tell me about your last experience using the Airbnb website/app.
What made you choose Airbnb over a hotel? What led to that choice? Why?
In what situation(s) would you opt for a hotel over an Airbnb?
What do you like most about using the Airbnb website/app?
What would you change about the Airbnb website/app if you could change it?
Walk me through your typical process for narrowing down your search.
Tell me about your experience with the booking/check-out process at Airbnb? Any frustrations or pain points? Any delights?
Understanding our Research
Reward Program-specific
Airbnb-specifc:
From this, we discovered that…
Users prefer a straightforward point system/tiers - no games or extra redeeming options
Users look for ease in “redeeming points”
User’s prioritize saving money & eliminating extra fees using their rewards
User’s prefer Airbnb due to location/flexibility and party size
User’s prefer Hotels due to lower costs, security, and booking rewards
Who are our primary and secondary users?
By addressing these key areas identified through user interviews and the affinity map we were able to clearly define who our persona’s were going to be and what main problem we had to focus on
Problem Statement
Individuls that typically stay at hotels need to be rewarded for Airbnb bookings to be able to increase their likelihood of booking through Airbnb and not through hotels.
Problem Statement
Frequent Airbnb users need to be rewarded for their bookings to incentivize continued loyalty despite high booking rates and fees.
Given our user’s motivations and pain-points what is the ideal path towards efficient booking, and reward usage?
From the perspective of our secondary persona we identified 3 separate user flows that highlighted…
Identifying user’s point status/balance
Exploring different lodging options in point mode
Booking a stay using your points
Designing our Solutions
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Wireframes (Low-Mid):
The user flows were used to inform the design for sketches and wireframes. A crucial piece of this flow was identifying steps to best use and manage points within the app.
Important callouts:
Point balance was designed in 2 different styles (linear/3 and circular/4) - this is a decision based off our C&C analysis.
Point history screen/5 was an add-on in the mockup process.
High-fidelity + Prototype set up
Designing high-fidelity wireframes revealed certain flows that were less intuitive than anticipated. By meticulously reviewing the wireframes, we identified areas of potential user confusion, made adjustments necessary to streamline the navigation, and enhanced overall usability.
Style Guide
We collected brand assets from Airbnb’s current website and built custom icons to support our high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes.
This allowed us to ensure consistency and a cohesive visual identity throughout the project.
1/2 Testing our Designs & Making Improvements
Upon making our prototype, we performed 2 usability tests.
6 out of 7 participants completed our tasks successfully, however we identified area’s of improvements and made iterations to our designs.
User Challenge: Challenges around entering your phone number before pressing “log in”.
Iteration: Removed an airbnb-designed step in their login process.
User Challenge: Users thought that they had to click into the “search destination” text box before going to the keyboard to start typing.
Iteration: Added a blinking cursor to the “search destinations” boxes.
User Challenge: “Display in points” in red felt like an error.
Iteration: Made the outline color the same as “Display in price”.
2/2 Testing our Designs & Making Improvements
User Challenge: Instructions were provided to pay using points, however upon check-out, a user kept “Pay in full” selected.
Iteration: Automatically filled “Pay using points” radio button.
User Challenge: Point balance was not displayed on front screen
Iteration: Eliminated redundant information in the search bar and replaced it with “points remaining”
User Challenge: “DIsplay in price” automatically turned off when “Display in points” was on.
Iteration: Created one toggle to represent “Display in price” and “Display in points”.
Next Steps!
Dive deeper into Airbnb’s business model to identify the best tier system from both the users perspective and a financial perspective.
Enhance the user’s experience by designing the feature of unlocking rare lodging options after reaching the appropriate tier level.
Re-designed the landing page/home page to support any new features from the users reward tier level.