Today, Airbnb is pulling the wrapper off of a redesign that encompasses the company’s entire digital footprint, including the logo and branding, the mobile experience, and, in particular, the desktop. And while these tweaks are individually quite small, Airbnb is quick to emphasize they’re all grounded in a new focus that they hope will broaden the company’s horizons. The first thing you’ll notice: On the homepage, and in the app, they’re intentionally emphasizing fewer of the homes you might stay in, and more of the lifestyle you might have.
Thus, the site is now papered with short videos of people grilling out or lounging on the couch—the beauty shot is no longer an image of some insanely expensive or kooky vacation home. Meanwhile, the community of Airbnb hosts has become central to the experience. You’ll see smiling host faces on every house listing you see. “This is part of the larger story we’ve been talking about,” says Katie Dill, Airbnb’s recently appointed head of design and a former Frog creative director. “We want users to understand the experience and the relationships behind it.”
That’s a squishy concept, but for Airbnb, there is a thorough-going rationale. The company is still hellbent on being defined not just as the second-coming of the hotel, but as a lifestyle brand with all the potential product offerings that entails. And that plays out in the redesign.
A New Logo
Look at the new logo and you’ll see an upside down heart intertwined with the outline of a place pin. There are a few layers of corporate mythmaking in there. The pin shows what Airbnb does; the heart evokes this new, more readily surfaced emphasis on community and personal experience; and the outline of the whole thing harks to the “A” in Airbnb’s very first logos. “We wanted to develop a symbol of belonging,” says Dill. “You’re staying in someone’s home and sometimes with someone as well, and making a connection.” Airbnb calls the new mark a “Bélo”—short for “belong.”
As part and parcel of trying to make the symbol ubiquitous, Airbnb is creating a marketplace where hosts can create decals and such for their guests–the Airbnb equivalent to all the branded hotel swag that might grace a Four Seasons, for example. As Dill says, “You’re going to see that carried out in every part of the brand.” Which brings us to the actual user experience.
The new homepage. Note that none of the pictures are actually of spaces, per se. They’re all of people and activities—an art direction that’s part of a push to make Airbnb a lifestyle brand. Airbnb
New Ways to Surface the Places You Might Like to Visit
Users familiar with Airbnb will notice myriad smart changes throughout. Legibility in search results has gone up as has utility, thanks to simplified information and a map that accompanies every list showing where each one is in relation to the others; the presence of host head-shots in smart places throughout adds a definite feeling of friendliness to the entire service; and the options available every step of the way towards a booking have been refined and rationalized. None of it is revolutionary, but taken together these make for a more coherent user experience, which Dill points out has been stripped down in many places, to emphasize only the information that users want, at the times they want it.
Airbnb has two main examples of this. The first is that search listings are no longer just by keywords, but also driven by contextual information about your location. In that way, Airbnb is a big data company. They have a growing body of information about what people near where you are like to search for. For example, romantic weekend getaways aren’t as sought-after in searches originating in San Francisco. By contrast good places to hike are at a premium. (Hey, no judgment here, San Francisco!) As my colleague Bob McMillan reports, the listings that Airbnb serves up will take into account that kind of knowledge.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood guides, which were once a central plank in Airbnb’s quest to become less about listings and more about inspiring travel content, don’t exist in their own silo. Instead, information about neighborhoods is surfaced at the bottom of every listing, in a map of the immediate area. Key words such as “hipster,” “restaurants,” and “cafes” are served up in a curated list driven by user descriptions of the neighborhood. Just as with the search results, here’s a case of Airbnb using data not to create new content, but to create the right context for what someone wants.
This new art direction represents a big investment for Airbnb: It commits them to creating a raft of new content that serves as vignettes of life outside a hotel. Airbnb
A New Art Direction
What dominates the homepage now aren’t photos, but rather short video loops, which Dill calls “living photos.” (It’s like Hogwarts with mustaches and vintage furniture finds!) Again, it ties back to the idea that Airbnb is advertising just a place, but a kind of experience that’s far removed from that of a hotel. “These images have to be immersive and cinematic. It has to be people that are highlighted, and their lifestyles.”
Getting there, for Dill and Airbnb, required a ruthless stripping out of any design details that didn’t emphasize that point. In Airbnb’s searches, it could have surfaced 12 types of information; they ended up just four, one of which is the host. “When a guest or a host interacts with Airbnb, everything has to feel like it’s all a part of the same thing. That type of consistency is what gives you peace of mind, and it makes you feel like it’s a stable place to build a relationship. There’s not much more on many of our pages but imagery that tells a story about a community.”
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