Airbnb Design Jam

(University of Washington - 1st Place)

"Connecting international students with a new community"

Problem

Create a solution that helps international students find support in new communities.

Value Proposition

Our solution was a new feature on Airbnb called the International Host. Certified International Hosts can help international students in getting situated in a new environment by providing language lessons, offering short term housing, and much more!

Primary Role

Product and UX & UI Designer

Challenges

The challenges that we faced in this Design Jam is time. We only have 1 hour to ideate and prototype so it was very important for us to divide up the time and roles efficiently. We spent 30 minutes interviewing and creating affinity diagram for solutions for our problem space. Then we divided up the rest of the 30 minutes for people to work on the presentation and prototyping. Another challenge was to work collectively as an unified group since our team members met each other for the first time that night and everyone came from different background.

Research: Interviews

One of the biggest challenges in this research was to find participants since it was a 1 hour design jam. Luckily, we were able to find an international student in the design jam and we asked for his recent experience and challenges on moving to a new country. We uncovered multiple inconveniences such as, it was difficult to find short-term housing, discover cuisine from home, and learn local transportation system.

Ideation

With our research findings, I proposed and led an affinity diagram session to discover commonalities in problems that students face in a new place. What we discovered was that it was difficult for students to find people with common interest, find career support, learn the culture and language, and learn to navigate around. Simply put, students feel lost without a local friend who is there to help them with basic inquiries.

Persona

Our target users are international students between the ages of 18-24. They have not stayed in the new country for an extended period of time previously. They are ambitious in school and adventurous in life. There are a lot of “starter” items that are difficult to complete remotely from another country e.g. set up mobile phone, learn local culture, find food from home in the new neighborhood. It becomes stressful to think about everything and to research online. He or she is looking for someone, almost like a local host, to connect with him or her to the new community and take the fear off their shoulder.

Low Fidelity Sketch

With our persona and research findings on user pain-points, I was responsible for sketching the preliminary idea for our app solution.

High-Fidelity Prototype

Next, I was responsible for creating the hi-fidelity prototype on Sketch and the other team members were responsible for putting together the presentation content.

Design Solution - Airbnb International Host

Recap From Event

We are very thankful to come out of this Airbnb design jam as the winning team. More importantly, we learned the importance of connecting user research and product design. Design solution cannot be developed in isolation without knowing customer’s pain-points. This is the key for human-centered design. Even though we were only able to interview 2 students at the design jam, it gave me inspiration and design direction to create features that solve for real problems. Lastly, I also learned to create interfaces quickly to match with existing brand identity so that the design feels consistent to the users.