Design-Focused Principles — Airbnb’s Success Story
Brian Chesky, originally from Niskayuna New York, graduated as Industrial Designer from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Joe Gebbia began his life as an artist and graduated from (RISD), where he earned dual degrees in Graphic Design and Industrial Design. Brian and Joe met when they were just design students at (RISD). During this time, they became good friends and discovered that together they make a great team. By the end of their college, they initially went their own ways. Until years later, while working for an industrial design firm in Los Angeles, Brian missed the idealistic entrepreneurial spirit of his time at RISD. And while working as a designer for Chronicle Books, Joe experienced first-hand how a design-led business worked. However, neither had stable full-time work. In 2008, Airbnb started out of the necessity to pay rent.
A major key factor in Airbnb’s success is its focus on the design and user experience of the platform. This is due to Brian and Joe’s design background and this is where Airbnb differs from companies such as Couchsurfing and Craigslist. While designing the platform, they implemented Steve Jobs’ three-click rule.
End goals always have to be three clicks away.
From the beginning, Brian and Joe focused heavily on the design and user experience of the platform. In the design approach, Brian primarily focused on functionality, product and user experience. He recognized Steve Jobs’s principle that design is not what something looks like, but how something works. Airbnb is an example of how a good understanding of design thinking can help in building and scaling a business.
Brian heard this quote that changed his life:
“You can live in a world of your own design, you can change the world, you can redesign it.”
I would like to highlight five main design-focused principles behind Airbnb’s success story:
1. Holistic Experience Approach
2. Design To Build Trust
3. Eleven Star Design Principle
4. Eye For Detailing
5. Interpenetration Of Culture & Design
Let’s dive deep into it!
1. Holistic Experience Approach
Brian’s attitude towards products is consumer-oriented and highly unique. He looks at products holistically.
Reid Hoffman praised Brian for his product perspective that goes beyond the product itself. Airbnb is not just a mobile app or website. It is a whole process, including customers’ experiences. Brian explained the meaning of product in the conversation with Hoffman:
“Technically speaking it is whatever the customer’s buying. Customers are not buying our website, and they’re not buying our application. That’s just a storefront of communication. What they’re buying is a house. And frankly what they’re buying more than the house is the host, experience of hospitality & the idea of belonging.”
Brian once said that he is obsessed with “A better way to design communities.”. His ability to adapt to changing circumstances proves that design is not a permanent thing. It is a continuous process. He noticed that the line between traveling and living will be blurred. For younger generations and most people, it is more important to seek experiences than material things. A sense of belonging played a crucial role because he was not designing a company for just visitors but for people who live in communities, where acceptance and connection are key factors to build a happy environment. Design is a way to solve problems holistically considering trends and data.
“The role of the designer is that of a very good thoughtful host anticipating the needs of their guests.” — Charles Eames
The product is much more than the end result. It could be compared to a life cycle that goes beyond its consumption. Product is a sequential process consisting of steps and touchpoints of how people experience things, starting even before the decision-making process. It’s a holistic experience that leads you to the “Aha!” moment!
2. Design To Build Trust
One of the main obstacles that Airbnb had to overcome was deeply rooted biases, especially stranger-danger bias. Before Airbnb, people were less open to the sharing economy, especially when it comes to one of the most personal things like their home. The idea of building a platform, where people will publicly post pictures of their most intimate spaces including their bedrooms and bathrooms to invite and allow strangers to rent was unthinkable. No one wanted to invest in a service that allows strangers to sleep in people’s homes. Why? Because we’ve all been taught as kids, that strangers equal danger. Joe thought design can build trust and overcome this stranger-danger bias. Once he said:
“In art school, you learn that design is much more than the look and feel of something — it’s the whole experience. We learned to do that for objects, but here we were aiming to build Olympic trust between people who had never met.” — Joe Gebbia
There is a study done on social biases and reputations at Stanford research. Studies found that we trust those people that we like.
A high reputation beats similarity and it is a way to overcome deeply rooted biases. The findings of the study state that the main ingredient to building trust is a well-designed reputation system. The second factor in building trust is the right amount of disclosure. Host acceptance increased with the appropriate amount of message length directly related to the host’s apartment. Therefore, they decided to create a form suggesting the appropriate length of the message and what crucial information should be entered. In other words, the form has been designed to intuitively build a connection and increase the rate of host acceptance.
Joe and Brian took the components of trust seriously while designing. They designed guidelines to encourage people to build a sharing economy.
3. Eleven-Star framework
In an interview with Reid Hoffman, Brian described the eleven-star framework concept as follows:
“On the internet, especially most marketplace businesses, the paradigm is five stars. So a YouTube video, Airbnb, or Uber it’s five stars. And the problem with five stars is the only reason you would leave less than five stars is that it was horrible. If you rate an Uber ride four stars, your life might have been in danger. In other words, the bar to get five stars is really low. ”
“We have to almost design extremely to come backward” — Brian Chesky
For Brian, five stars were not enough. He wanted to build a product so good that customers would share their experiences with friends because it had a meaningful impact on their lives. In other words, Brian was so focused on perfecting his product that he wanted to receive an email from customers asking for a sixth, seven, or even more star rating. The most feasible experiences are six and seven.
The five-star is what people expect but to build what people will love, you have to build more than their expectations. Every moment is an opportunity to do something slightly more than people’s expectations. This principle applies to almost everything at Airbnb.
4. Eye for detailing
During the early days of Airbnb, Joe and Brian observed most of their hosts have poor-quality pictures of their rooms. Joe and Brian visited these hosts and photographed rooms themselves. Their experience with upgrading photographs proved that code alone can’t solve every problem that customers have. While computers are powerful, there is only so much that software alone can achieve. However, going out to meet customers in the real world is always the best way to wrangle their problems and come up with clever solutions.
5. Interpenetration of Culture and Design
Brian received ground-breaking advice from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and famous venture capitalist — “Don’t Fuck Up The Culture”. Also with the same title, Brian wrote an article on medium.com. What Brian means by culture is simply a shared way of doing things.
“People need to be in the mindset of your product. And so you have to put your product in the building. People need to be immersed in the world because they’re working in that world. It’s like working in the center of the universe. The center of the universe of your business needs to be most potent.”
There is a mutual relationship between culture and design. Airbnb shows cool spaces around the world, they have to have an interesting space inside. Brian has a rule that everything can be designed and reinvented. And the space in which employees are located can also be reinvented and designed with a holistic culture in mind, where employees share the same values. One of the more interesting examples is the redesign of the company office. He came up with the idea to design meeting rooms identically to the apartments of Airbnb users. All of their meeting rooms were modeled piece by piece after apartments on their website, they recreated the room. So the meeting rooms are homes you walk into. Sometimes they even write emails to users if they can design one of the meeting rooms identically to the client’s apartment. It is a small example of how designing a culture can make a huge difference and build a competitive advantage, which translates into hiring and many other things. A strong culture is built by people, who are deeply passionate and share ways of doing things. They believe in what they’re doing. Brian thinks that a strong culture is about repetition, constantly showing the same values that can’t be changed under any technological circumstances. One of the examples is when you check your key card at Airbnb, it says “Champion the Mission”. This is one of the values that remind you every day what’s important. A strong culture can be designed by subtle things that are like touchpoints. It’s a sequence, consisting of each moment that can be designed to reinforce how you want people to value things. Having a strong culture is an effective way to hold each other accountable, not through hierarchy, but through the community. By creating a culture you can set a norm of what is all focused on, so there’s no dissonance — everyone is on their mission.!!
That’s all for now. I would love to hear your thoughts about this article in the comments section.
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