Creating a Platform for Community Organizing

Airbnb saw the need to grow its public policy expertise in-house in order to help organize energetic hosts and home sharing advocates and to more effectively communicate with local community leaders about the value of home sharing.

Client: Airbnb

Role: UX Lead

Deliverables: Internal and external user interviews and analysis, personas, user journeys, task flows, user stories, information architecture, wireframes, prototype

Project Time Frame: January through November, 2016

Above: The homepage of the interim community platform site. — **Above:** The homepage of the interim community platform site.

background

Home sharing is a contentious issue in many cities around the world. Blamed for accelerating gentrification, pushing long time residents from their homes, and increasing crime and property damage, it has garnered considerable public criticism. As the biggest home sharing platform, Airbnb found itself in the position of fighting local legislation efforts across many cities. With an active community of motivated hosts, Airbnb saw a way to remove funds from local elections and increase involvement in the democratic process. Without a consolidated digital space, it was difficult to get everyone on the same page and share the events and achievements of the community.

solution

Through the design and development of a robust and responsive website and digital strategy, a platform for the policy team at Airbnb to organize and share content with established supporters and influential media and elected officials and staff was established.

In order to create this more robust platform, we undertook a series of user and stakeholder interviews both to gather organizational requirements and get a feel from actual users of their paint points and how we could best design a system that would encourage adoption. From these interviews, we developed personas, user journeys, and then started design first by mapping out the site architecture and then with wireframes and visual design.

Below, I've included select personas and user journeys that I created to inform the design strategy for the project. These personas and user journeys helped outline feature and content needs for the different platform audiences. I've also included select desktop and mobile wireframes to showcase some of the key content and feature requirements for the platform.

Persona: Informed Staffer

As a member of staff who is comfortable with technology, Sam represents staff members who often help to form positions for supervisors or policymakers who are not familiar with newer advances in the digital landscape. Research indicates that a common point of conversation with elected officials is an explanation of what homesharing is, but more tech literate staffers help bridge that gap.

Persona: Neighborhood Leader

Seen as motivated allies for Airbnb and homesharing policy, those who rent space in their homes and actively work to strengthen their communities are in need of a central place to learn more about homesharing, its benefits, and how to engage local politicians.

Ladder of Engagement

Designed to articulate exactly how a user might mature and deepen their interaction with the platform over time, this ladder shows how the platform can be designed to take digital leadership behaviors into account with many engaging at lower levels and relatively few engaging at higher levels of commitment.

User Journey: Informed Staffer

This user journey for the Sam articulates what content and features she and users like her will need from the platform over time.

Wireframe: Map Community Finder

Besides a standard search functionality, we also provided site visitors with a means of browsing and locating community pages and content by map.

Wireframe: Community Landing Page

The key role this platform serves is a channel for collecting and distributing vital information about home sharing for hosts, guests, and any others looking to promote responsible home sharing. This landing page template lays out the content and functionality that a local community will need.

Wireframe: Local Community Continued

Besides the hero area, more is needed to tell the story of home sharing in the community. This quick look at the impact numbers and ways to get involved are just some of the features in the template.

Wireframe: Stories from the community

With this wireframe, we wanted to lay out how the content sourced from hosts, guests, and local business owners would be featured on the platform. Note the alternate tile layouts to accommodate stories with quality photography and the layout for stories without photography.

Above: Research showed that homesharing meets a hierarchy of needs, which could be used to create an engagement strategy. — **Above:** Research showed that homesharing meets a hierarchy of needs, which could be used to create an engagement strategy.

Above: A redesigned homepage hero, featuring more news stories, brand-consistent styling, and a clearer content direction.

Next steps

The redesigned website has launched and can be viewed here.