Airbnb Winter 2022 Release

Team Management · Product & Design Direction · UI/UX Design · Prototyping

After a busy and successful launch in the summer, my team and I took a step back to work on some of the smaller launch items for the winter release.

The theme of this release was making it easier for new hosts to list their home, help set clear guest expectations, and provide more personalized support. For the guest facing experiences, that included making improvements to the review flow and clarifying the house rules section. We also expanded on the launch of categories.

Reviews

For hosts, one of the best ways to track success is through the reviews guests leave. It provides both the qualitative and quantitative data to help hosts learn what they do well and where they can improve. However, for new hosts, it can be time consuming to read through all the reviews and know which improvements to focus on first. Plus, for guests, it can be hard to phrase constructive criticism or suggestions.

To resolve this, along with simplifying the number of steps in the review flow, we added the ability for guests to add tags to their review. Depending on the rating the guest provides, we show a different set of tags to best capture accurate feedback. These tags, such as the host being "Always responsive" or the listing "Looked like the photos", provide clear qualitative feedback that the host can track over time.

House Rules

Previously, house rules were relatively unstructured. Hosts could add any freeform text requiring guests to read and compare a new set of rules for each home they were interested in booking.

We simplified the house rules by making it easier for Hosts to select predefined options. We also ordered the rules by the stage of the trip the guest would need to know them; checking in, during the stay, and checking out. Not only are these options now easily understood by the guest, but are enforceable by Airbnb in case something goes wrong.

New Categories

Building upon the success of categories in the previous launch, we designed and built six new categories; Adapted, Hanoks, New, Play, Top of the world, and Trending. For each of these categories, as well as some existing ones, we add new highlights. These highlights range from showing the home’s elevation while in the Top of the world category, to showing the distance to the park entrance in the National parks category.