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Airbnb Design
Designed Chaos
Building the visual identity for season two of Airbnb Design—Talks
Categories:Case Study — Meredith Schomburg
It was a thrilling oxymoron of a brief. The ask? Design a system around the topic of chaos. When it came time to start strategizing the second season launch of Airbnb Design—Talks, When Chaos Is Your Creative Director, I was immediately ahead of myself. I was mapping out an Illustrator artboard for the first poster concept that popped in my head before our first meeting wrapped up. I knew exactly what to do with this… or so my excitement led me to assume too quickly.

There’s an unrivaled excitement (and occasional untested confidence) that comes when starting a new project. But that feeling can be a double-edged sword if you fall hard for your first idea and miss the depth that comes from exploring multiple directions.

We all have our own version of the creative process—how we solve problems, iterate, and deliver the final work. However, experience has taught me that we have to be careful not to let our personal habits hinder us from respecting necessary principles while crafting experiences for others. Here are the considerations I made and the concepts that stayed to bring When Chaos Is Your Creative Director to life.

Slow Your Roll
Rushing to implement that initial idea is a hard habit to kick. Sometimes time is the motivating factor because you just have to getsomething done. In other instances, your first concept just feels so right that you can’t possibly imagine something better coming to you. Before you know it Project_V1.ai is open, and you’re deep in layers of distressed textures and the newly released GT font. You’ve lost track of your intended message entirely. Guilty.

My first take on our chosen theme resulted in a chaotic collage of sorts. Images were distorted using basic Photoshop filters, and proposed event deliverables showed the speaker’s name scribbled in almost completely illegible handwriting. Throw a bunch of haphazard elements on a page and you get visual chaos, right? That was my first thought, but I was missing something.

Sure it looked cool, but I leapt to the making phase of the project so quickly that I hadn’t stopped to fully flesh out the underlying point of everything. Season two of Airbnb Design—Talks is all about people who find order and activate within chaos, and I left out the order. The end result of my first take felt expected. I invested so quickly in my first concept thatwhen faced with the necessity ofproposing additional concepts, I stumbled a bit.

Distorted lettersPoster ExplorationVarious experiments with distorted letters
(Initial takes on my first Chaos concept)

It may oppose your every instinct, but some caution is necessary when that first enticing idea hits and you want to dive in fast and deep. If you don’t slow down, your frame of reference can be so flavored by the first concept that any other exploration can end up looking like the awkward cousin.

Of course everyone’s process is different, but there’s something to be said for the research and conversations that happen in the discovery phase—it just works. The temptation to quickly jump into a project blocks the opportunity to discern all the different stories you could tell—stories that are relevant and bring others into the process.

Don’t get me wrong, slowing down isn’t easy and I’m still teaching myself to do it. In theory, it’s easy to tell yourself to just slow down. But in practice it’s easier said than done, so I started to train myself with physical exercises. When I feel rushed or a flurry of ideas come on, but know I need to take a step back, I actually tell myself to slow my breathing. I take a walk. I do something to physically slow my body down, which allows my mind (and process) to follow suit.

At first, forcing myself to literally stop, drop, and slow my roll felt awkward. But I’ve found that the more I actively practice the physical manifestation of the mental space I want to be in, the more intuitive a slow, thoughtful approach has become part of my process.

Give It Meaning
When you recognize a design as aesthetically pleasing, your enjoyment of it can be that simple—it just looks nice. But I’d argue that a true connection takes place when there’s an intentional story woven into the art direction. What does it all mean? Whether the audience perceives the plot or not, that element of narrative intent has the ability to draw people in. And just like anything else, a good story takes time to develop.

I often find myself tasked with proposing various concepts in response to a single ask. How many compelling stories can I tell? For each concept, I write guiding principles—a manifesto and defining characteristics—in a place where I’ll be constantly reminded of them. I’ll pair each principle with an specific set of artboards when I’m working. By pairing these principles with each concept, I’m able to uphold each one’s integrity, create clear distinctions between them, and maintain the authenticity of each story.

And these stories don’t come from a silo. Unique stories that reach a broad audience require different points of view. I work alongside a Brand Strategist, an Editorial Producer, and a Creative Producer—all of whom leverage their strengths in partnership with me. We sharpen each other to deliver authentic, compelling narratives to our community.

Bring It To Life
As our team dove deeper into the topic, we arrived at a new point of entry—Chaos Theory—which says that “within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns.” Our series would feature people of varying professions—a hostage negotiator, an actor, a video game designer, and more—all of whom bring order to chaos in their respective fields. Our curation and an alternative definition of chaos started to tell the perfect story.

Poster of deconstructed hand
(Launch poster graphic for season two of Airbnb Design—Talks)

This time around, I designed every element of deliverables to tie back to that story—that underlying patterns only seemed chaotic. Where the first direction was random, the refined concept had order.

The color palette was a brightened version of Airbnb’s brand colors. Imagery, while broken up and distributed across the page, was set according to a library of geometric fractals (inspired by Chaos Theory found visually in nature).

We even took our recently launched, custom typeface—Airbnb Cereal—and distorted it. While the type was cut along a precise baseline, the very idea of deconstructing a precious project that took so long to craft was a risk. It was an invitation for us to embrace our own chaos and deepen the narrative.

Airbnb color palette
(The relationship between Airbnb’s brand colors and our Chaos colors)

Various distortions and color experiments
(Application of the color palette to imagery and photography)

(Fractal shapes used to mask and distort imagery)

masking technique broken down
(Breakdown of the masking technique)

fractals and masks
(Fractals and application masks)

Broken apart text
(The distortion system applied to Airbnb’s typeface, Airbnb Cereal)

While I preferred the look of my initial concept, our team decided on the Chaos Theory concept because it more deeply connected with the intent of the series. It’s a valuable lesson to remember: don’t pitch a concept just because you like how it looks. Instead, choose one that best connects with what you mean to communicate.

That fluorescent blue, gradient overlay might look neat, but if you have to work backwards to make it fit the brief, you should probably rethink it. Don’t let your personal preference convince you that it’s the best option, but definitely keep it as an experimental piece.

Make Them Feel
None of this is to say that your first idea won’t be the winning concept. Rather, this is all about intention. There’s a huge difference between just going with your first idea versus being confident in your initial instinct. One approach settles with the least amount of effort, while the other acknowledges the value of an idea while staying curious and remaining open to other explorations. When multiple avenues are thoughtfully investigated, your confidence and conviction is justified.

Authentic work comes from slowing down and developing stories that back it up. By considering our desired outcome from the beginning—like how we want people to feel or what we hope they’ll learn—we can intentionally design everything to connect back to our goals.

If you’re creating something for yourself, by all means, make it look cool just because. Do it for your own enjoyment. Design quick and messy. But if you’re designing for someone else, give them your best. Slow your roll, give it meaning, bring it to life, and make them feel.

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Meredith Schomburg is a Graphic Designer and Illustrator on the Design Brand team at Airbnb. She identifies as a Southerner with no accent to prove, loves chatting enneagram types, and prefers walking absurdly long distances to any other form of transportation.
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‘UX’ Marks the Spot: Mapping the User Experience
Posted on November 20, 2012 by Luke Chambers in Design – 5 Comments

I define UX as finding the sweet spot between the needs of the users and the business, and designing a product that fits the gap.

This means we need to understand the impacts on the user of what we’re designing, and be able to justify and prioritise any changes based on the ease of delivery or better results for the business. It opens up a new world of sales-speak for us and ROI, KPIs and metrics become an important part of UX and its digital strategy.

A typical UX project might map user tasks as a task flow, or explain a user’s thoughts or feelings at certain points using scenarios, but we can get a much better picture if we put this all together on one page – we’ll get an end-to-end view of a users experience in context, which we can then use to understand, justify and prioritise our approach. This page is known as an ‘experience map’ or ‘customer journey map’.

What is an Experience Map?

Well, let’s first unpack some of the key benefits:

It makes the customer experience understandable and addressable: so we can be coherent and consistent in the messages we need to get across.
It helps us find critical ‘moments of truth’ for the user: so we can focus on these points to make significant improvements much more achievable.
It unites any corporate silos and ignites a focus on the customer: it can be a shared langauge and focus point for communicating insights from different parts of the business.
Most importantly, it visibly connects business value and customer value. This is something that a lot of UXers struggle with, and in my blog post yesterday I explained why this is a critical factor we must get right if our discipline is to have a rosy future.

The grandfather of modern marketing, Peter Drucker, once said “the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer” (i.e. to create value for our customers). A customer experience map helps reveal the touchpoints where this occurs. It allows us to see the easy wins and the longer term solutions required.

How do I create one?

Start by creating an inventory of all touchpoints a customer has with the product or service – both large and small. You can group them by channel (website, call centre, social media, etc) and give an indication of roughly where in the customer’s process they fit.

The key inputs for mapping the experience are the research activities you conduct, such as stakeholder interviews, customer surveys and contextual enquiries (primary research), and existing business documentation or industry reports (secondary research). Once you start to synthesise this research you can start matching your insights with the inventory.

Rail Europe Experience Map, by Adaptive Path
Rail Europe Experience Map, labelled on the right with the five dimensions suggested by Adaptive Path’s Chris Risdon

Chris Risdon from Adaptive Path suggests there are five dimensions to the map:

The Lens – 3-5 key findings or guiding principles to keep in mind while considering the map. These might be things such as reasons why users choose this type of business over others (ie. using a bank over keeping cash stuffed in their mattress), bigger-picture thoughts such as “opening a bank account is only part of people’s larger financial savings process” or insights into how this is done “people build their plans over time”.
The journey model – this will look different for every project, but should always illuminate the most important dimensions – transitions from phase to phase, switching between different channels. There is a bit of information design (a la Edward Tufte) to be done – how many people use certain channels, which part of the experience is broken, etc. The user’s actions need to connect to the system we’re designing – the touchpoints we’re orchestrating. Critical moments of truth will also often map to places where money flows in or out of an organisation.
Qualitative insights – ‘doing’ (the journey model above) linked with at least 2 or 3 notes on ‘thinking’ (usually in question form, ie How much money is this going to cost? Can I use this? Will it work?) and ‘feeling’ (with responses such as frustration, satisfaction, sadness, and confusion).
Quantitative information – should be included in the mix to help balance relative parts of the journey, ie. indicating that only 20% of user encounter this touchpoint, or an indication that the business is seen as irrelevant at certain stages of the customers journey. This can easily be shown as a horizontal bar chart, or as certain thicknesses of arrows in the journey model itself, so elements of the customer journey can be compared.
The Takeaways – This is where you get to propose and recommend solutions to fill the gaps identified. They can be grouped by stages or as a ‘global’ view. They may come from your thinking peripheral to the customer’s actions, or to address their questions in thinking/feeling that the current system doesn’t currently do. It may link multiple stages for efficiency, or give users more control. It should show what you can do to improve the experience. For example: “Enable people to plan over time”, “Arm customers with information for making decisions” or “Make your customers into better, more savvy buyers”.
It’s also a good idea to include references to your information sources, whether they be your interviews, surveys and cognitive walkthroughs, or existing client documentation.

Finally, the map should stand on its own, without needing extensive explanation as it is circulated around the organisation.

So, what’s next?

Print it out. Email it around. Ask people to share it with others they work with. I usually try and have a large copy of several feet long stuck up on our design wall so it can be a shared reference point. It’s important not to treat the experience map as a deliverable. It’s a catalyst for change, and while it’s not a service blueprint it does help steer direction.

Now that you have a better handle on customers’ journeys across all touchpoints, you can more fully understand where to focus budget, design and technology resources. Derived from an overall “diagnostic” evaluation (of which the experience map is just one part) you can make a number of recommendations for focused initiatives.

Here are some links to further information you might find helpful while doing your own customer experience mapping:

Anatomy of an Experience Map – Adaptive Path
Customer Journey Map : Service Design Tools
Mapping the Customer Journey (PDF) – Bruce Tempkin
The Value of Customer Journey Maps – UX Matters
Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience – Harvard Business Review
Any questions? Feel free to ask in the comments!

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UX Research Cheat Sheet

by Susan Farrell on February 12, 2017

Topics:

Research Methods

Design Process

Summary: User research can be done at any point in the design cycle. This list of methods and activities can help you decide which to use when.

User-experience research methods are great at producing data and insights, while ongoing activities help get the right things done. Alongside R&D, ongoing UX activities can make everyone’s efforts more effective and valuable. At every stage in the design process, different UX methods can keep product-development efforts on the right track, in agreement with true user needs and not imaginary ones.

One of the questions we get the most is, “When should I do user research on my project?” There are three different answers:

Do user research at whatever stage you’re in right now. The earlier the research, the more impact the findings will have on your product, and by definition, the earliest you can do something on your current project (absent a time machine) is today.

Do user research at all the stages. As we show below, there’s something useful to learn in every single stage of any reasonable project plan, and each research step will increase the value of your product by more than the cost of the research.

Do most user research early in the project (when it’ll have the most impact), but conserve some budget for a smaller amount of supplementary research later in the project. This advice applies in the common case that you can’t get budget for all the research steps that would be useful.

The chart below describes UX methods and activities available in various project stages.

The diagram lists potential UX research methods and activities that can be done as projects move through stages of design. Think of this as a menu of recommended options. Your process will vary and may include only a few things on this list during each cycle. The most-frequently used methods are shown in bold. (Graphic by Sarah Gibbons.)

Each project is different, so the stages are not always neatly compartmentalized. The end of one cycle is the beginning of the next.

The important thing is not to execute a giant list of activities in rigid order, but to start somewhere and learn more and more as you go along.

Top UX Research MethodsDiscover• Field study
• Diary study
• User interview
• Stakeholder interview
• Requirements & constraints gatheringExplore• Competitive analysis
• Design review
• Persona building
• Task analysis
• Journey mapping
• Prototype feedback & testing (clickable or paper prototypes)
• Write user stories
• Card sortingTest• Qualitative usability testing (in-person or remote)
• Benchmark testing
• Accessibility evaluationListen• Survey
• Analytics review
• Search-log analysis
• Usability-bug review
• Frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) review

When deciding where to start or what to focus on first, use some of these top UX methods. Some methods may be more appropriate than others, depending on time constraints, system maturity, type of product or service, and the current top concerns. It’s a good idea to use different or alternating methods each product cycle because they are aimed at different goals and types of insight. The chart below shows how often UX practitioners reported engaging in these methods in our survey on UX careers.

The most-frequent methods used by UX professionals, from our free UX Careers survey report. Percentages refer to the proportion of respondents who said they use each method at least every year or two.

If you can do only one activity and aim to improve an existing system, do qualitative (think-aloud) usability testing, which is the most effective method to improve usability. If you are unable to test with users, analyze as much user data as you can. Data (obtained, for instance, from call logs, searches, or analytics) is not a great substitute for people, however, because data usually tells you what, but you often need to know why. So use the questions your data brings up to continue to push for usability testing.

Discover

The discovery stage is when you try to illuminate what you don’t know and better understand what people need. It’s especially important to do discovery activities before making a new product or feature, so you can find out whether it makes sense to do the project at all.

An important goal at this stage is to validate and discard assumptions, and then bring the data and insights to the team. Ideally this research should be done before effort is wasted on building the wrong things or on building things for the wrong people, but it can also be used to get back on track when you’re working with an existing product or service.

Good things to do during discovery:

Conduct field studies and interview users: Go where the users are, watch, ask, and listen. Observe people in context interacting with the system or solving the problems you’re trying to provide solutions for.

Run diary studies to understand your users’ information needs and behaviors.

Interview stakeholders to gather and understand business requirements and constraints.

Interview sales, support, and training staff. What are the most frequent problems and questions they hear from users? What are the worst problems people have? What makes people angry?

Listen to sales and support calls. What do people ask about? What do they have problems understanding? How do the sales and support staff explain and help? What is the vocabulary mismatch between users and staff?

Do competitive testing. Find the strengths and weaknesses in your competitors’ products. Discover what users like best.

Explore

Exploration methods are for understanding the problem space and design scope and addressing user needs appropriately.

Compare features against competitors.

Do design reviews.

Use research to build user personas and write user stories.

Analyze user tasks to find ways to save people time and effort.

Show stakeholders the user journey and where the risky areas are for losing customers along the way. Decide together what an ideal user journey would look like.

Explore design possibilities by imagining many different approaches, brainstorming, and testing the best ideas in order to identify best-of-breed design components to retain.

Obtain feedback on early-stage task flows by walking through designs with stakeholders and subject-matter experts. Ask for written reactions and questions (silent brainstorming), to avoid groupthink and to enable people who might not speak up in a group to tell you what concerns them.

Iterate designs by testing paper prototypes with target users, and then test interactive prototypes by watching people use them. Don’t gather opinions. Instead, note how well designs work to help people complete tasks and avoid errors. Let people show you where the problem areas are, then redesign and test again.

Use card sorting to find out how people group your information, to help inform your navigation and information organization scheme.

Test

Testing and validation methods are for checking designs during development and beyond, to make sure systems work well for the people who use them.

Do qualitative usability testing. Test early and often with a diverse range of people, alone and in groups. Conduct an accessibility evaluation to ensure universal access.

Ask people to self-report their interactions and any interesting incidents while using the system over time, for example with diary studies.

Audit training classes and note the topics, questions people ask, and answers given. Test instructions and help systems.

Talk with user groups.

Staff social-media accounts and talk with users online. Monitor social media for kudos and complaints.

Analyze user-forum posts. User forums are sources for important questions to address and answers that solve problems. Bring that learning back to the design and development team.

Do benchmark testing: If you’re planning a major redesign or measuring improvement, test to determine time on task, task completion, and error rates of your current system, so you can gauge progress over time.

Listen

Listen throughout the research and design cycle to help understand existing problems and to look for new issues. Analyze gathered data and monitor incoming information for patterns and trends.

Survey customers and prospective users.

Monitor analytics and metrics to discover trends and anomalies and to gauge your progress.

Analyze search queries: What do people look for and what do they call it? Search logs are often overlooked, but they contain important information.

Make it easy to send in comments, bug reports, and questions. Analyze incoming feedback channels periodically for top usability issues and trouble areas. Look for clues about what people can’t find, their misunderstandings, and any unintended effects.

Collect frequently asked questions and try to solve the problems they represent.

Run booths at conferences that your customers and users attend so that they can volunteer information and talk with you directly.

Give talks and demos: capture questions and concerns.

Activities

Discover

Ongoing and strategic activities can help you get ahead of problems and make systemic improvements.

Find allies. It takes a coordinated effort to achieve design improvement. You’ll need collaborators and champions.

Talk with experts. Learn from others’ successes and mistakes. Get advice from people with more experience.

Follow ethical guidelines. The UXPA Code of Professional Conduct is a good starting point.

Involve stakeholders. Don’t just ask for opinions; get people onboard and contributing, even in small ways. Share your findings, invite them to observe and take notes during research sessions.

Hunt for data sources. Be a UX detective. Who has the information you need, and how can you gather it?

Determine UX metrics. Find ways to measure how well the system is working for its users.

Explore

Follow Tog’s principles of interaction design.

Use evidence-based design guidelines, especially when you can’t conduct your own research. Usability heuristics are high-level principles to follow.

Design for universal access. Accessibilitycan’t be tacked onto the end or tested in during QA. Access is becoming a legal imperative, and expert help is available. Accessibility improvements make systems easier for everyone.

Give users control. Provide the controls people need. Choice but not infinite choice.

Prevent errors. Whenever an error occurs, consider how it might be eliminated through design change. What may appear to be user errors are often system-design faults. Prevent errors by understanding how they occur and design to lessen their impact.

Improve error messages. For remaining errors, don’t just report system state. Say what happened from a user standpoint and explain what to do in terms that are easy for users to understand.

Provide helpful defaults. Be prescriptive with the default settings, because many people expect you to make the hard choices for them. Allow users to change the ones they might need or want to change.

Check for inconsistencies. Work-alike is important for learnability. People tend to interpret differences as meaningful, so make use of that in your design intentionally rather than introducing arbitrary differences. Adhere to the principle of least astonishment. Meet expectations instead.

Map features to needs. User research can be tied to features to show where requirements come from. Such a mapping can help preserve design rationale for the next round or the next team.

When designing software, ensure that installation and updating is easy. Make installation quick and unobtrusive. Allow people to control updating if they want to.

When designing devices, plan for repair and recycling. Sustainability and reuse are more important than ever. Design for conservation.

Avoid waste. Reduce and eliminate nonessential packaging and disposable parts. Avoid wasting people’s time, also. Streamline.

Consider system usability in different cultural contexts. You are not your user. Plan how to ensure that your systems work for people in other countries. Translation is only part of the challenge.

Look for perverse incentives. Perverse incentives lead to negative unintended consequences. How can people game the system or exploit it? How might you be able to address that? Consider how a malicious user might use the system in unintended ways or to harm others.

Consider social implications. How will the system be used in groups of people, by groups of people, or against groups of people? Which problems could emerge from that group activity?

Test

Protect personal information. Personal information is like money. You can spend it unwisely only once. Many want to rob the bank. Plan how to keep personal information secure over time. Avoid collecting information that isn’t required, and destroy older data routinely.

Keep data safe. Limit access to both research data and the data entrusted to the company by customers. Advocate for encryption of data at rest and secure transport. A data breach is a terrible user experience.

Deliver both good and bad news. It’s human nature to be reluctant to tell people what they don’t want to hear, but it’s essential that UX raise the tough issues. The future of the product, or even the company, may depend on decisionmakers knowing what you know or suspect.

Track usability over time. Use indicators such as number and types of support issues, error rates and task completion in usability testing, and customer satisfaction ratings, to show the effectiveness of design improvements.

Include diverse users. People can be very different culturally and physically. They also have a range of abilities and language skills. Personas are not enough to prevent serious problems, so be sure your testing includes as wide a variety of people as you can.

Track usability bugs. If usability bugs don’t have a place in the bug database, start your own database to track important issues.

Listen

Pay attention to user sentiment. Social media is a great place for monitoring user problems, successes, frustrations, and word-of-mouth advertising. When competitors emerge, social media posts may be the first indication.

Reduce the need for training. Training is often a workaround for difficult user interfaces, and it’s expensive. Use training and help topics to look for areas ripe for design changes.

Communicate future directions. Customers and users depend on what they are able to do and what they know how to do with the products and services they use. Change can be good, even when disruptive, but surprise changes are often poorly received because they can break things that people are already doing. Whenever possible, ask, tell, test with, and listen to the customers and users you have. Consult with them rather than just announcing changes. Discuss major changes early, so what you hear can help you do a better job, and what they hear can help them prepare for the changes needed.

Recruit people for future research and testing. Actively encourage people to join your pool of volunteer testers. Offer incentives for participation and make signing up easy to do via your website, your newsletter, and other points of contact.

Conclusion

Use this cheat-sheet to choose appropriate UX methods and activities for your projects and to get the most out of those efforts. It’s not necessary to do everything on every project, but it’s often helpful to use a mix of methods and tend to some ongoing needs during each iteration.

Related article: When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

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UX Methods and Activities in The Product & Service Design Cycle (600k) (PDF)
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