Short Essay: How design thinking works and the case of Airbnb

How design thinking works and the case of Airbnb

ZHU, Shiman 1155082207

Companies and entrepreneurs who intend to explore unexploited market need strategy helping them come up with new ideas and find opportunities. Besides the blue ocean strategy, design thinking can also give a business an edge over its rivals and be an integral part of commercial success.

What’s design thinking

The idea of design thinking is generally regarded as an analytic and creative process to match people′s needs not only with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. It is characterized by three processes: understand, explore, and materialize. And within these three flows fall six core phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement. This collaborative design process helps people and organizations become more innovative and more creative in problem-solving.

Why design thinking

Being different from the Silicon Valley mentality, design thinking is a human−centered approach. Coding and programming are powerful, however, it alone can’t solve every problem that customers encounter in real life. Going out to meet customers in the real world is almost always the best way to wrangle their problems and come up with clever solutions. Design thinking is just the one starts with user data, creates design artifacts that address real and not imaginary user needs, and then tests those artifacts with real users, finally converts needs into economically demands. Also, design thinking welcomes diverse disciplines and leverages collective expertise, thus yields multiple solutions.

How design thinking formed and transformed Airbnb

The found of Airbnb is a classic design story. The business started as a hospitality when the founders’ friends came to San Francisco for stay but the hotels through the whole city have been sold out. Instead of making this experienced just sitting sleeping on the airbed, Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb and his roommates started to think through the whole entire journey of the arrival of their friends as if they are in travel. They placed a guide in airport showing how to get to their apartment, helped guests to learn about the neighborhood and provided home-made breakfast.

For a long time, Airbnb is acknowledged as the model of sharing economy, but it’s also the outcome of design thinking. Like so many startups, Airbnb has gone through a hard time for survival. In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust. Thanks to the industrial design backgrounds of its two of early founders, it was the idea of design thinking that made a turning point of the startup. When the team was poring over their search results for New York City listings, they noticed there's some similarity between all these existing 40 listings—terrible photos. So Joe and Brian flew to New York and went door-to-door to spend some time with customers listing properties, and replaced the amateur photography with beautiful high-resolution pictures. A week later, it showed the improving of pictures doubled the weekly revenue to $400 per week.

As the co-founder Joe Gebbia pointed out, “observe a problem and with design thinking or design perspective or design ethos, you see two dots that don’t make any sense but somehow in your head you can connect them in a different way.” While Airbnb is date driven, they don’t let data push them around. Design thinking is still playing a role when the company is growing. The team often starts with a creative hypothesis, implements a change, reviews how it impacts the business and then repeats that process. Devoting to deliver the best user experience possible, Airbnb often forms a team to conduct an in-depth foundational research to get data. After data analysis and synthesis, the team always ends up with a tree-structure-like taxonomy which helps them to formulate well-informed hypotheses. And they think ambitiously broadly practicing the simple elements—brainstorming.

Unlike some other companies, Airbnb aligns its user experience goals with business goals. They set up several programs to get data-driven insights and experience design principles as the basis of decision criteria. Hospitality Lab is the one through which its employees can explore what hospitality is and are enabled to inform hosts with feedback; a user journey visualization project called The Snow White illustrates the critical moments of truth within the host and guest; and a program for new team members to take a trip and immerse into the guest experience helps the company to gather empathy data gathered which then will be fed back into daily operations.

The design thinking culture which encourages employees to take measured, productive risks on behalf of the company leads to the development of major new features and allows Airbnb to move quickly and continually find new opportunities. In short, it is the widespread organizational understanding how data-driven creative processes work sets Airbnb apart from the other tech-companies.

References

How Airbnb uses Design Thinking in Projects – An Example

Retrieved from: http://thisisdesignthinking.net/2015/05/airbnb-design-thinking-example/

The Link between Data Triangulation and

Brainstorming Facilitation: Design Thinking at AirBnB

Retrieved from: http://thisisdesignthinking.net/2015/05/airbnb-design-thinking-culture/

How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business

Retrieved from: http://firstround.com/review/How-design-thinking-transformed-Airbnb-from-failing-startup-to-billion-dollar-business/

Design Thinking 101

Retrieved from: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-thinking/