✅ Kleiner Perkins Fellowship 2024 design challenge passed
This is a personal project that aims to elevate user experience by incorporating filters on reviews, expanding feature functionality, and allowing users to quickly find trustworthy reviews that are most valuable for their decision-making process.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
ROLE
UX/UI Designer
SKILLS
UX/UI Design, UX Research
TIMELINE
1 week : 2024.01.08 - 01.15
FINAL DESIGN
Final Design Solution!
In order to find helpful reviews people need quickly and easily when selecting a place to stay on Airbnb
Main characteristics of this redesign project -Expand feature functionality
Fast filters for photo/video reviews
Detailed filters and sorting based on ratings to browse honest reviews
Customization based on traveler type, preference, what they look for when deciding a place to stay
Let’s now see the design process below!
01 motivation
INTRODUCTION
What’s the background?
Airbnb has acknowledged how reviews are critical to help build trust, let hosts maintain or improve room quality, and increase booking rates of Airbnb users. Good and bad reviews both are important.
But, people want to see reliable reviews instead of typical positive reviews.
Impact of reviews on Airbnb -
02 understand
DIGGING DEEPER RESEARCH
Survey (30 participants) & 3 Interviews
“What do people look for when using Airbnb?”
People consider location, rate, and reviews the most when deciding a place
Factors that users look for when deciding a place to stay
“What do people look for when reading reviews?”
Users want honest and reliable reviews, but they often feel that many Airbnb reviews are biased towards marketing and promotion.
Users consider reviews as an important factor when deciding a place to stay.
People want honest reviews and tend to look for negative reviews.
People find photos reviews from other people most informative when booking.
Takeaways
Research more what other products provide in reviews
Add a function that people can search negative ratings
Emphasize photo/video reviews
Add filters or tags that people look for frequently
Opportunity
03 identify & synthesize
RESEARCH
Meet Jasmine and her story!
Jasmine loves to travel to new places, both alone and with her family. She uses Airbnb frequently since she can experience diverse cultural experiences. She relies on reviews the most when selecting a place to stay.
However, it takes a long time for her to read through all reviews to find a reliable, trustworthy information.
DEFINE
“Airbnb users don’t find the current reviews helpful”
The Problem!
Many users find that a lot of reviews are neither reliable nor trustworthy.
It takes a long time in reading a lot of reviews
WHY?
04 industry research
COMPARATIVE RESEARCH
How are others providing review information?
I then looked more deeply in review page of 2 other products in the same industry and 1 product where reviews are considered important.
Summarizing comparative analysis
05 ideation
REFLECTING PRIOR RESEARCH
Following questions were asked while doing comparative analysis and research, which helped to develop 2 design targets.
How should we guide our ideation?
Improve feature expandability
How might we allow users to quickly discover and access emerging features related to review reliability and trustworthiness?
How might we enable users to customize their review experience to prioritize the types of information they find most valuable?
Efficient Filters
How might we design a review system that allows users to easily filter and sort reviews to find the most relevant and reliable information?
FRAMEWORK
After ideating several options of review page, analyzed pros and cons, and developed final solution
Coming up with diverse options
Adding filters on Review page
Option 1
Keep search and add filters
(photo reviews hidden in filters)
Increase discoverability by keeping search function
Easily search for information by adding filters
prosUsers tend to not use search function
Less discoverability - users need effort to find Information they consider helpful (photos, location info etc)
consDelete search & add reviews with image (search hidden in filters)
Option 2
Highlight photo/video reviews
Enhance discoverability of previews of photo reviews
Easily search by filters
prosconsPreviews of photos and written reviews can give too much cognitive load
Takes a lot of space
Another page needed to see photo reviews
Option 3 (recommended)
Decrease review number size & delete search & add filter photo reviews (search hidden in filters)
Increase discoverability by displaying photo reviews separately
Able to quickly filter photo reviews
Easily search by filters
pros consAccessibility of the filter icon
Search function hidden
06 Test, iterate, iterate!
USABILITY TEST
How should we improve user experience?
After conducting usability test to 3 participants, I was able to define priority and non priority issues.
Review page iteration
BEFORE
The rating number is unnecessary large
Users cannot search for negative reviews
issues!
AFTER
>
* Change 01
* Change 02
* Change 03
Decrease size of ‘Guest favorite’ rating banner
Enlarge Overall ratings
Enable rating filter by letting users to see only those reviews when clicking on specific rating (ex. 4 star reviews only)
adjustment!07 final design
Final prototype
FINAL DESIGN
In order to find the information users need quickly and easily when selecting a place to stay on Airbnb
Main characteristics of this redesign project -Expand feature functionality
Fast filters for photo/video reviews
Detailed filters and sorting based on ratings to browse honest reviews
Customization based on traveler type, preference, what they look for when deciding a place to stay
FINAL DESIGN
Explanation in detail
01 Review page
Current Airbnb
Redesigned
Fast filters of ratings and for photos/video reviews were added
[Added] Rating filters
[Added] Photo/video reviews filters
02 Sort by most recent, top reviews, highest & lowest rated
Current Airbnb
Redesigned
Considering user needs, designed filters that users can customize to their preference and travel styles. Search function is hidden in detailed filters.
03 Detailed filters
[Added] Detailed filters
Search by tabs or typing filter by traveler type filter by ratings filter by time of year08 wrapping up this design challenge..
WRAP UP
Takeaways from this design challenge
Considering diverse user scope, was able to dig deep research about people’s preference and style when traveling
Was able to converge findings into defining problems and ideation
01 Sympathizing user needs
If I had more time, I would have gathered data (quantitative and qualitative data - surveys, interviews, more participants in user tests) leading to more accurate user friendly designs
Especially usability tests could be improved in the future
02 Improve data-driven accurate results
In the future, I would like to improve details of filters, validate what type of filters are needed and used a lot
Research on what filters are affective in competitors and refine Airbnb’s filter details
03 Additional exploration
