Airbnb
Profile

I began my journey at Airbnb on the Trust team with a mission to build the worlds most trusting community. Ecstatic, about all the things I’d learn and the impact I’d be able to have on Profile, a new team within our Trust department. I was immediately presented with this mesmerizing problem space of Reputation Signals within user profiles as my long term project and in the near term migrating our current guest and host profiles over to our new and improved design system.

Profile is more than the destination Profile page. It is a combination of widgets that appear throughout the experience. The Profile page isn’t as highly trafficked when compared to other pages on the platform and because of that fell behind on front-end updates.

As the teams sole designer, I was in charge of creating high fidelity mockups and prototyping, validating my visual explorations with teams outside of my own to ensure continuity across surfaces, brainstorming potential new features, collaborating with my cross functional partners (reasearch, data, content writers, anti-discrimination) and implementing processes to help us communicate and work towards the best solution.

Year
2020

Role
Experience Design

Company
Airbnb

The problem
Re-designed early 2019.

Profile was re-designed in early 2019. Since that time, we introduced a new design language system, which is slowly being translated across Airbnb’s many flows and surfaces. Updating Profile would allow continuity across our other product surfaces, resolve a lot of our accessibility issues, such as low color contrast, and provide a strong foundation for future projects.

Slide to view before and after below.



Process
Where the magic happened.

Looking at the existing components and finding opportunities to add subtle functional improvements (even though they were out of scope). I looked at what was currently implemented and created a brief along with my cross functional teammates for us to define timing, requirements, dependencies across other business units and finally I dug into currently open JIRA tickets that we could potentially address during our design update.

Takeaways
Looking ahead.

Working on Profile was quite an interesting space as my first foray in-house at a company. I got to re-flex some of the muscles of communication that I didnt have to use as often coming from an agency. Partnering across so many disciplines and workshopping with multiple teams and stakeholders made the process seem long but rewarding as I was able to handoff my designs to my engineering team to build.

I was excited about my future work on Reputation Signals that I would have been a lead contributor on. I can’t wait to see the progress the team makes going forward. I am happy to have been apart of the process, from planning experiments and workshops, to validating and testing assumtions for the future of Profile through refinments to the hierchy of signals we present at different points during a user’s journey.

Credits
Helped make it all possible.

Michelle Mederos
Kyle Miller
Juca Lopez
Kaleb Zenk
Ross Solomon