

Airbnb UX Wins and Losses - jason_shah
http://blog.jasonshah.org/post/18135779651/airbnb-ux-wins-and-losses-how-the-airbnb-home-page

======
untog
I love these kinds of articles, they're always reliably interesting. And
always kick up decent debate as well, given that people often have different
opinions about what works, and no-one has access to the actual data proving
anything.

In a previous job (life?) I was put onto a project to (effectively) clone
AirBnb, and spent a lot of time staring at the home page. While it's nice to
see it again, boy am I glad to have moved on.

An aside: airbnb.com takes 4-5 seconds to load for me, compared to near
instantaneous load on other sites. You could spend days tweaking your home
page, but if people get frustrated waiting for it to load then you're
handicapping yourself.

------
jaredsohn
One thing that I don't understand about their interface is that if you click
on a listing and then "back to search results", it doesn't return you to your
search query but rather does a search for everything.

Also, it would be really nice if they would allow saving a search query for a
trip being planned (I'm assuming they don't allow this now); it can be
annoying to have to find and copy/paste some long address and fill out other
parameters every time you want to resume your search.

~~~
picasso81
"but rather does a search for everything."

We're fixing this.

~~~
jaredsohn
Thanks; look forward to it.

BTW, there is some other funkiness in the UI, too. If I choose a city and some
amenities and some neighborhoods and then add on 'social connections', it says
that my search is too specific. But I notice that after I do this, my
neighborhood selection is no longer there. Amusingly, this means that if I
uncheck 'social connections' and check it again it will be able to show me
something since my search is no longer too specific.

------
jason_shah
Collaborative consumption sites have unique challenges in earning user trust.
Anyone know of successful UX tactics other applications have used?

~~~
kenrikm
Mailchip has a really nice site and is very easy to use considering email
campaigns can get pretty complicated.

------
jsavimbi
> there’s no need to outline the box and make it look misaligned with the
> “Search” button.

Wrong and poor advice to subvert browser functionality. Alert the user to
which input they are currently working with. Eliminates [tiresome] user
guesswork and is conventional. Also helps the visually challenged.

> via overlay boxes

I don't even.

> I enter my city and hit ‘Enter’. That triggers the search, without giving me
> a chance to enter my dates first.

It occurs to me that this is part of the design. They show you the inventory
before asking you for your size, even though if you had the patience you can
input your desired dates on the homepage. Also, note the date input is also
available after form submission. Something tells me that they've done some
research on user behavior.

> How else can Airbnb improve?

I'm going to stop now because if anything, this post is novice-level and
poorly thought out if one is assuming that they can make better what they
don't understand.

~~~
chrisacky
I didn't want to sandbag the original poster, but this was the line of thought
I was heading down also.

Additionally, the ranking of results when you search is processed by Google
places autocomplete. The request never actually hits any AirBnB server for
ranking. This is done on Google side via their friendly API.

~~~
untog
This definitely wasn't always the case. Around 8 months ago it was definitely
pulling down a custom list in JS, but they do appear to have changed it since.

