Airbnb’s major revision, 4 million novelty houses are here, this is called travel! ｜Interview with Airbnb China Design Team Leader

The well-known design studio Peter Pichler built this invisible mirror house. The host Sabina has lived here for more than 30 years. She shared this beautiful place with more people on Airbnb.

This is also one of the favorite homestays of Wang Ying (Sunny), the head of Airbnb's China design team. She was very moved when she saw a comment barrage sent by a user, which read:

For the first time Alps saw what he was like.

"Unique" means that the house has a strong personality and recognition. It is a complete individual and cannot be easily copied. You have never seen it anywhere else. You can remember it at a glance, as if the house has its own soul. Same.

"Unification" means that it will have a very distinct theme, a harmonious and unified style, and can convey the concept and spirit behind it through its own image, rather than random splicing of popular elements.

"Integration" means that the house can be naturally integrated with the surrounding environment. It is the finishing touch in the landscape itself, rather than standing abruptly in one place.

Mirror House is just one of the 4 million unique listings around the world recently announced by Airbnb. You may have seen all kinds of interesting and strange houses under their "OMG Wonderful" feature category before, this time directly upgrade to more than 60 Featured categories.

Tree houses, boat houses, stone houses, castles, windmill huts, cave homestays, arctic scenery, ecological earth houses, farmhouses, container houses, shepherd's huts… Wang Ying excitedly described the novel and interesting categories and houses, as if they were about to go away Row.

Airbnb has grown from the bed & breakfast, a homestay, to its establishment in 2007, and has had more than 6 million active listings. Among them, there are more than 4 million "unique listings" as defined by them. This ratio makes me Very unexpected.

In Wang Ying's view, this "uniqueness" is not intentional, but natural.

This difference comes from the fact that the homestay itself is the home of most people. "When everyone builds their own home, they will inject a lot of understanding of life, love for home, and the accumulation of their own aesthetics. Therefore, they have their own It’s a unique idea, and there are various houses built around the world.”

First of all, we will retain the strong architectural features of the house itself, then look at the regional scenery and local activities in its location, and finally look at what life experience it can bring to people – so that everyone can know when they see the name, living in this place What the house can bring them.

Airbnb’s long-standing design thinking has rebuilt the relationship between residents and landlords—they are not just the relationship between renting and living, but their respective lives intersect here, creating a life experience exclusive to this place.

For example, a very caring landlord will be like an old friend in a foreign country; the neighborhood experience brought by the local house and the new friends you meet through the surrounding activities will continue to add emotionally to the good feeling of a trip.

If you see that the environment of this house is beautiful enough, the people you meet in the house will share more stories and cultures with you. Once this spiritual connection is established, it will be formed. Deeper memories make you more attached to this place.

From this unique listing, it can also be found that under the seemingly fleeting or short-lived novel experience, Airbnb is still continuing this sense of belonging that has been built for a long time.

In Wang Ying's view, novel and unique houses, coupled with invisible spiritual values, make people more willing to share and spread word of mouth on social media or in their own circles, and this house will become more and more famous.

With mutual promotion, Airbnb has more and more unique novelty houses.

When building novelty houses becomes a trend, it is not an easy thing to catch fire.

Talking about how the landlords of unique houses turn innovative ideas into real estate listings, and how to let more people into their houses – Wang Ying looks at this construction process from an open perspective.

The house most viewed by Chinese users on Airbnb is the Giant Bone House in California, USA. It took 25 years to build successfully, and it can be seen that the architect behind it has put in bold ideas and lasting ingenuity.

But we don't want everyone to build a masterpiece as soon as they come up… In fact, as long as they can realize their wishes with heart and hands, one day it will be discovered by others.

From a design point of view, Wang Ying believes that to build a popular and unique housing source, "realizability" is the first, first have a good idea, and at the same time it can be solidly implemented, the second step is to consider "realization" Live."

"The house can't be purely unconventional, it must be built with functionality in mind, and people need to live well in this space." The most popular potato house on Airbnb is that it really looks like a giant potato, so that At first glance, people may think that the inside is all hard and smooth cement, but in fact the inside is very contrasting and cute, with pink and white tones and complete facilities, and you will feel warm and comfortable when you walk in.

They found that after the launch of more than 60 unique listing categories, the most attractive categories for Chinese users are "what you see is what you get", such as "charming swimming pool", "beautiful landscape", "sea view homestay" and "country homestay". "Linhu B&B" and so on.

At first glance, these classifications do not even have anything to do with architecture, but you can find out at a glance what activities you can do and what kind of scenery you can see through this house.

This is also an idea for landlords who want to build their own buildings: your house is best built in a playable place, or the inside of the house can provide some space for people to enjoy and explore activities.

It was built by a father and son on a tree by themselves. Even in a not-so-famous location, many people are moved and famous by the story.

On the whole, as long as you put your heart into it and put your love for life and your own ideas into it, I believe that the smell of wine will not be afraid of the alley, and this house will shine one day.

Especially under the epidemic situation, when you can't go out to play at will, everyone's desire for the unknown world has become stronger, "Maybe everyone just doesn't want the same life day after day, but just wants to experience something new. "

Some people say that the essence of design is to solve problems. Wang Ying believes that the problem they solved this time is "unique and deep":

What we want to do is to allow everyone to go to places they have never been to, live in houses they have never lived in, and experience different possibilities in life within a very limited number of trips or limited number of stays.

Before the outbound tourism was fully opened, they turned the viewing page into a window through apps and small programs, so that everyone can not only feast their eyes in advance, but also increase the accessibility while browsing online, just like a cloud Traveling around the world-a lot of loving "small thoughts" have been injected into it.

Wang Ying is not only the head of the design team, but also the person in charge of the product that led this revision. When you enter the homepage of the new Airbnb platform, you will see all kinds of interesting strange houses in the world flowing down the infinite waterfall. Ying revealed to Ai Faner that Airbnb could only do city-level searches before, but now everyone can see the whole world at a glance.

It's as if you have a virtual globe in your hand, and you can go to see where you turn.

More than 60 classified icons are concise and clear, and it can be seen that they have been carefully designed. Wang Ying said that the Chinese name of each icon has actually undergone a lot of research and research by the team. Compared with the cold tool words on other big platforms, these names are quite interesting and intimate.

Does it feel familiar? That's right, it's just like brushing short videos.

"This method of watching short videos was actually invented by the Chinese, and it is also a method that users around the world are very addicted to," Wang Ying said. They combined this method of viewing content with the traditional scene of looking for housing. Looking at a house in full screen, you can feel like you are in the house. The whole process is like a cloud tour.

When people can't go out, they want to use this method to give everyone a kind of spiritual and emotional comfort even if they look at the house on their mobile phones.

This experience design for Chinese users can also be said to be Airbnb’s new “localization practice”.

In Wang Ying's opinion, this small colorful interaction in the dark night mode is infused with emotional design, "The house is lit up because of your likes, and it also lights up your desire to travel. There is a kind of mutual respect behind it." bright meaning".

In order to allow people to search more flexibly, the Airbnb product team also added a function of “superimposing different characteristic categories”. After all, when they want this and that, adults often want them all.

Surprise discovery + immersive exploration is the whole path to create a new product experience. And those icons, names, and all kinds of loving details in the interaction make Airbnb become Airbnb.

Two of the three co-founders of Airbnb are designers, so Airbnb has always attached great importance to design culture.

Therefore, when they are designing, they are not just designing an app or a website, but designing a very diverse experience.

Everyone in the design team needs to be able to think independently, not only to do the visual part of aesthetics and packaging in everyone's impression, but to go deep into the preliminary research and offline prediction, from a person's willingness to travel to how to do it after the trip Sharing memories with people has to be considered holistically, like a complete mesh map.

The success of each of our designs may not necessarily be reflected in cool new interactions or new visual expressions, but also in solving the most complex problems in the simplest way, which will make our designers very proud point.

We must first define the user value of the product, think about who it solves and what problems it solves, and then give it a self-consistent underlying logic, such as the embodiment of its talent, and finally give it a creative aesthetic packaging that is pleasing to the eye and loves at first sight.

The first is the "grass planting" stage, which is the beginning of the whole path. “We hope that when everyone discovers the house and immerses in the exploration, the “grass planting” will be maximized. When people see so many interesting houses on Airbnb, although they can’t go out, they can say that their bodies have not moved and their hearts have been far away.”

The second is to deepen the path to realize "grass planting". "We will continue to do enough infrastructure construction. When the epidemic is about to end or when overseas is opened up, everyone can quickly find the house they want, and then start traveling smoothly. This is the direction we will focus on in the future."

The future test is still there, and the result is still unpredictable, but this time focusing on unique housing resources, it can be said that they are continuing to amplify this advantage.

Finally, I asked Wang Ying what she would design if she wanted to build her own unique house. She said:

I had some small dreams very early on, to build my own building. I hope it is a house that can turn around and see different scenery in 360 degrees. At night, I can chase the moon and see different starry sky. It would be even better if it can have long legs. I often dream that I live in a house with legs, traveling between different cities, a bit like "Travel of Strange House", where I can live wherever it goes.

To think of tourism in a simple way is to play, and to think in a deeper way is to understand the world more deeply, and at the same time live your life differently and live a limited life differently.