Airbnb and coronavirus
The coronavirus has destroyed the travel industry around the world. The home rental company named Airbnb was unstoppable before, and even this one has not been forgiven. The news headlines have focused mainly on the measures it is taking to stock cash to balance the losses, but behind the scenario, this 12-year old company is now redesigning the products busily.
This redesigning include the home screen as well as app landing pages to indicate such a world where long term stays are in, and short term stays are out.
Chief Design Officer and His Thoughts
Let us see what the chief design officer of the Airbnb, Alex Schleifer, has said –
He was asked about the design process –
- What was the design process like?
- And how long the design process could take?
- Where does he start on a redesign like that one?
Alex Schleifer replied that the team of Airbnb had mapped that out within three weeks, and there had been around two hundred employees who were working on that project. There were people from ops, localization, products, policy, engineering, design, and so on. That was a hard operation and everything that they needed to do required to be done accurately in 60 different languages. Due to the scale they did, the idea was often the simplest piece.
He also said that the difficulty had been sharpened due to the crisis, and everybody had been working from home. Also, there had been a lot of questions, but there was also massive energy.
Alex Schleifer also said that one could put a banner on the homepage, or he could start talking with the governments and hosts to realize what kind of assistance they required and either that was something that they wanted, then he started building. Part of that was like the behaviour of the guests on their platform, which changed every day.
