Understanding Student Travelers
The problem space
Since its founding, Airbnb has primarily catered to those traveling on a budget, but recent expansions aimed to capture luxury travelers. This project aimed to return to Airbnb's roots and understand exactly who budget travelers are, what their values are, and how we can specifically cater to their needs. As part of the Northwestern Bay Area Immersion Program, we had an initial timeline of seven weeks to conduct research, gather insights, ideate, prototype, iterate and present our findings in the form of a service solution Airbnb could implement. Ultimately we narrowed our focus to understanding Student Travelers, and how we could best cater to their specific values.
Continuing in the second part of our course at Northwestern with the Segal Design Institute, we established and expanded our new platform design – Airbnb Student. We spoke with students and hosts alike to find out what use cases Airbnb Student could facilitate, discovering pain points in both the student travel experience and the host experience.
Beginning the research phase by determining what questions need to be asked.
Design role
My role in this project, which included three other Northwestern students and an Airbnb mentor, included collaborating with other team members on ideating and working through roadblocks, conducting interviews, synthesizing insights based on the research, identifying pain points, generating potential solutions, building prototypes of our solution and testing them with users. Specific skills utilized include writing/branding, video editing and graphic design through Adobe Creative Cloud products.
Collaborating with team members to develop personas.
The user - who are they and what is their journey?
Below are just a few of the vital artifacts we created that allowed us to make informed decisions on who to design for, what to design, and why.
After conducting initial research and narrowing our focus to budget travelers, we developed two personas based on the unique values these student travelers have while on a budget.
With our research, we generated a journey map for a budget traveler, allowing us to highlight key pain points along the way.
In order to determine what parts of the booking and travel process we could impact, we developed a stakeholder map.
From this work, we then determined 4 key research insights to guide our ideation on catering specifically for student travelers on a budget.
After coming up with 100+ ideas, we narrowed it down to an all encompassing service called Airbnb Student. This service blueprint shows the "Leap" phase, meaning what is possible for the service 3 years from now.
Once our blueprints laid the groundwork of what would be required for creating Airbnb Student, we set out to develop a prototype to test with users using Adobe XD.
Success Metrics
Our main metric for success was gathering and interpreting user feedback. Throughout our entire process, feedback was extremely vital in guiding next steps and ensuring we were on the right path. This was especially critical for the prototype phase, as parts of the design that seem intuitive may not be for others!
The Result - revolutionizing the student experience
Our project for Understanding Budget Travelers culminated in the creation of an extension for the Airbnb platform catered specifically for students, called Airbnb Student. The platform helps eliminate some of the barriers students have to booking travel, especially on the current Airbnb platform. This will allow Airbnb to capture a new market and gain the loyalty of students, many of whom will become high-end travelers they are currently trying to attain.
Learning outcomes
I realized that much of knowing how to work on design is about knowing the process, being able to diverge and think outside the box for solutions, and then converge to actually help better the user experience. Moving forward, I would like to make the research part of the process more integral to each step, as many of the challenges we faced along the way were easily answered once we put something in front of users.