Streamlining Travel Planning: Car Rentals & Group Chat for Airbnb

Before deciding which features to design, I conducted quick feature research by examining frequently requested features. This involved reviewing app feedback, Airbnb’s latest summer 2024 feature releases, and Brian Chesky’s crowdsourcing initiative on Twitter (now X) back in 2016.

Ultimately, I decided to focus on streamlining travel planning, as this aligns closely with Airbnb’s mission to “create an end-to-end travel platform that will handle every part of your trip.” I framed my project with the question: ‍

How might we help Airbnb users streamline their travel planning experience?

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Proposed Features

‍To improve the travel planning experience, I focused on two new features:

1. Car Rental Integration:
   By offering car rental services, Airbnb can save users time by combining accommodation and transportation bookings into a single platform.
2. Group Chat with Planning Tools:
   Enabling group chat, with tools like poll creation, can minimize the back-and-forth between in-app activities and external follow-ups, making group planning more efficient.

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Problem Statement

‍Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, and it is focused on creating an end-to-end travel platform that will handle every part of your trip.

Trip planning often involves separate bookings for accommodation and transportation, which can be time-consuming. Integrating car rental into Airbnb would streamline the process, offering travelers a convenient two-in-one option while providing hosts with extra income opportunities.

Moreover, every group trip has an unsung hero—the planner who handles bookings and logistics. Introducing a group chat feature with tools like polls and itineraries could help distribute planning responsibilities among all group members.

Prototype Development

For the car rental feature, I examined several car rental apps and heavily referenced Turo’s information architecture for the listing process. Turo’s car rental flow offers excellent UX, and I wanted to learn from the best to avoid reinventing the wheel. I condensed Turo’s car listing flow to better fit Airbnb, as the rental listing for Airbnb hosts is already lengthy, and adding more details would increase cognitive load.

Airbnb's design is renowned for its graceful and effective use of iconography, with icons playing a central role in representing key actions, categories, and features across the platform. For this project, I gathered various Airbnb icons from the Figma community and created additional ones when necessary. 

I started building the prototype from the ground up, beginning with key design patterns such as spacing, color, and text styles in Foundations, and amenities, car, and property cards in Components.

In total, I have designed five flows:
Flow #1: Enable Car Rental
Flow #2: Enter Car Details
Flow #3: Set Car Rental Price
Flow #4: Access Group Messaging
Flow #5: Create Polls

Usability Testing — Round #1

My test plan is structured around these five flows/tasks. For each task, I began by reading participants a scenario where they imagined being either an Airbnb guest or host. I then asked them to perform tasks while thinking aloud.

Key Findings

1. Time-Saving Delight: Saving time during the listing process is a moment of delight for users. They appreciate that the VIN confirmation automatically imports the car's details.
2. Earnings Transparency: Users want a clear breakdown of earnings, with a transparent view of revenue from both home and car rentals.‍
3. Group Chat Discoverability: The group chat has low discoverability. Users are accustomed to chat bubble icons and notifications similar to those on Instagram or TikTok.

“Entering car details is very simple. With the VIN confirmation, I don’t have to type in my car’s Make and Model. That’s very convenient.”

“Having two separate price settings is overkill. I would prefer a price breakdown on a single page so I can easily see how much I earn from both home and car rentals.”

Based on usability feedback, I made several improvements:

1. Dynamic Dropdowns for Car Details: I implemented dynamic dropdowns for fields like car mileage range and state, using Figma’s variable feature. This allows users to select options that automatically populate the text fields.
2. Simplified Pricing Flow:
   • Feedback revealed that separate settings for home and car prices were redundant.
   • Similar titles like “Set your home price” and “Set your car price” caused change blindness.
   • I merged these into a single pricing page, where variables dynamically adjust total pricing as users modify home or car rental amounts.
3. Improved Group Chat Discoverability:
   • Added a chat bubble icon in the top navigation bar.
   • Included instructional hints to help users locate the poll feature within the group chat, particularly for first-time use.

With these updates, the second prototype is now ready for the next round of usability testing!

In the second round of testing, I structured my test similarly to the first, with five separate tasks where I asked participants to imagine scenarios and perform tasks while thinking aloud.

Key findings from the second round include:

1. Users think the design looks clean and feels seamless, as if it’s already integrated into Airbnb. The microinteractions feel realistic.
2. Minor adjustments are needed, such as updating the progress bar, increasing the clickable area for expanding the price, and reworking the wording in certain areas, such as changing “per night” to “per day” in price settings.
3. Users want additional functionalities for the group chat and the poll, such as setting a deadline for the poll.

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"The designs are much better than the first time."

"Very clean and seamless. I don’t see many problems. Feel like the features already exist within the app."

In summary, after conducting two rounds of moderated usability testing, I identified three major insights:

1. Airbnb has the potential to tap into the car rental market, gaining a competitive edge over services like Turo, Hertz, and Expedia by offering integrated car rentals within its platform.
2. Users value the convenience of Airbnb’s car rental option. They will use it as long as the price is reasonable, and the car quality meets expectations.
3. Users are not entirely convinced of the usefulness of the group chat and poll features. Currently, the ability to chat with friends and create polls isn't compelling enough. Adding features like itinerary creation or cost management and splitting could make the group chat more appealing and attract more users.

A highlight of this project was when I figured out how to use variables to create dynamic prototypes, making the prototype more realistic. Kudos to Figma for bridging the gap between design and front-end development!