Achieving consistency
How we improved Airbnb listing card consistency across multiple inventories and mediums.
The Problem
Airbnb’s search results had different card shapes depending on each vertical: homes and experiences. That resulted in a fragmented experience and complexity when listing mixed inventories. Cards didn’t follow a common system or style.
Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, personally asked our team to solve this problem. He wanted not only to achieve consistency across verticals but also bring an editorial feeling to the cards in line with Airbnb’s brand initiatives.
The Project
I worked with Taido Nakajima from the Trips team in proposing a consistent and robust card system that can support homes, experiences and beyond. We worked for over 6 months and proposed nearly 30 versions of the card system to an ever growing team. Brian Chesky himself was involved in the last set of reviews. As he once said, “These little cards have more impressions than our Superbowl ad”. We wanted to do it right.
The System
Once the card system was approved I worked with Pablo Caro to incorporate it into our Design Language System and components library. During this process I realized I love working on design systems!
The Results
We ran the new card system as an experiment and after a few iterations, we were able to launch it to 100% of our user base. This project was definitely the most impactful project I have ever worked on.
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