Airbnb founder: How to integrate social elements into web design?

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The author interviewed Airbnb's co-founder Joe Gebbia and talked about how the site shifted its focus to social services.

The following also describes the "Magic" code tool used by Airbnb, which may be more important than you might think.

There is no better time for Joe Gebbia than it is now. 5 years ago, Gebbia's friend Brian Chesky (from the Rhode Island School of Design) came to his house to rent a room in his attic. That weekend, a group of designers looking for a hotel to attend an upcoming design convention was held in the city of Gebbia, but the local hotel rooms were full. Chesky had no job at the time, so he and Gebbia decided to provide a weekend accommodation for a part of the local designers who quickly earned 1,000 of dollars in income, so Airbnb was born.

The company's current market capitalisation is about $2 billion trillion, and it is said to be raising 100 million of billions of dollars in venture capital after it has received $120 million trillion in capital injections. Airbnb is continuing to achieve substantial growth and rapidly expand overseas markets. But fast-growing companies are often quickly disappearing on the market, and as a result, Airbnb has been ramping up its efforts to transform its Web site into a platform for social experience rather than a search portal. Gebbia, who recently hosted the innovation by-design won of Fast Company, interviewed the magazine and talked about how Airbnb's idea of turning into a social platform was first formed.

Change from star rating to "Love" score

The above changes start with the redesign of the entire site 4 months ago, and the core of the redesign is the "Wish List" feature, where users can create their own dream house lists that they want to experience. Currently 45% of users interact around the wish list, and users create more than 1 million lists. If the Airbnb team had overlooked these simple little changes, the remodeling of relationships between users and websites might not have happened.

For years, Airbnb's registered users have been able to perform star ratings on the houses they have visited and keep them. But Gebbia's team considered the question of whether a slight adjustment in some places would add more stickiness to the user, so they changed the "star" score to "Love". To their surprise, user stickiness increased by 30%. Later they realized that "star" is a universal network marking method and practical symbol, it does not have much significance. By contrast, "Love" represents desire!

Gebbia to Co.Design: "It made us see the potential for something more powerful." "More importantly, this change makes the Airbnb team think about the limitations of services based on search technology." "The site does have to provide search functionality, but if users don't know where they want to go," Gebbia said.

The Airbnb team has been thinking about why love scores and star ratings have a very different effect, and eventually they develop a "wish list" concept.

On the surface, the service seems to be similar to the nails you create in Pinterest, where you can list your most coveted destinations and share them with other platforms. It's like you can post the "Wish List" on Facebook, see the "Wish list" that friends create, and share with others the "wish list" you've created for your current journey. But from a broader perspective, these lists on the Airbnb web site have been sublimated into content. Because it is content, the wish list provides users with an open list of content that may not be rendered without the service.

In a way, Airbnb's transformation is a function upgrade. You can use these lists and plan your travels in a coordinated way. In addition, the "Wish list" further changes the relationship between the user and the site. Users visiting the site is no longer just for booking rooms, they may just want to have fun.

In the long run, this will be the source of Airbnb brand value. When a lead starts planning a trip, but has not yet embarked on an online hotel search, the fun that Airbnb offers will make these customers think about visiting the site the first time. Other companies are also considering shifting their focus from search to services with social elements. Airbnb is a good example, and these companies will follow suit.

The "Magic" code tool provides smooth scroll bar functionality

Huge ventures can help the site buy a lot of useful resources, such as building 10 of offices around the world, and Airbnb can send photographers to take photographs of houses within 48 hours of the owner's registration on the site.

The site can also take advantage of these investments to keep an eye on the details of the site construction, and even users may not be aware of them.

At least for the coder, perhaps the most surprising is the endless scroll bar you see on the Airbnb House list page. You can try to drag the scroll bar straight down (but not just drag the scroll bar directly to the bottom of the page), you will find that the page will display a lot of different content, you can always drag the scroll bar, and the page loading speed does not seem to drop. When you drag the scroll bar up, the page will still display correctly. (Coder: In fact, Airbnb opened the source code of the Infinity.js "Magic" feature to express Airbnb's goodwill toward the coding community. The magic is the fact that, despite the size of the photos, the Web site is able to achieve a smooth scroll bar.

It may seem like a tiny detail, but every good website engineer would say: Speed equals stickiness. Seemingly simple scrolling tool code makes it possible for users to drag the scroll bar all the way down and attract them in a fluid fashion to find other valuable content that allows the site to gain the implicit benefit of a rise in customer satisfaction. This is important because if Airbnb really plans to be a content-based, social-oriented platform, the site will need to prove to them that the content is valuable every time they visit. One way to do this is to make it easy for users to browse more listings. (Wing Compilation)

This article link: http://www.socialbeta.cn/articles/how-airbnb-evolved-to-focus-on-social-rather-than-searches.html