Product Design Challenge #1: Airbnb Add-on Services

Designing an optional service add-on for Airbnb users

👋 Welcome to a new section in Designary, the Product Design Challenge: Every month, you’ll receive a realistic product design challenge to work on your skills, including product thinking, UX design, research, and prototyping. You can use it purely for practice purposes or even as a portfolio case study. If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge, you can manage your preferences in your account settings.

---

Scenario

You are working as a product designer for Airbnb in one of the consumer mobile app squads. Your team consists of a product manager, two full-stack engineers, a QA engineer, and a user researcher.

Problem

As part of a recent research initiative, our team ran a customer survey to ask people how to improve their experience with renting on Airbnb. The survey was sent via email to 1000 users who recently made their first booking.

64% of users selected “Additional services when renting (laundry, ironing)” as their most important benefit for improving their rental experience.

We are looking at evaluating whether such an option would provide value to users and the business and how it would work within the consumer app.

As part of this exercise, you can make the following assumptions:

• We can partner with laundry services in selected areas to launch this add-on.

• These services can collect and delivery laundry from your customers during their stay.

• The cost depends on the items being sent for washing and whether ironing is needed.

Goal

• Define the key success metrics for a feature like this: Why should the company invest in building it, and how will it affect commercial metrics? What product metrics show us if we are successful?

• Come up with a way to test the demand for such an option without having to build a feature. How would you test it inside the app?

• Design a prototype to test with users, leveraging openly available libraries such as this. If you would like to practice your UI design skills, try recreating the Airbnb App UI from scratch. Think through the whole user flow:

  • How does a user first see the option for add-on services?

  • How do they select and pay for it?

  • How do they schedule collecting their laundry?

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. You can share your process and output in the comment section (by adding a note) if you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community or simply share it internally with your team and peers.

Recommended tools

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition

• Figma for mockups and prototypes

This challenge will help you with

• Product Thinking

• Business Thinking

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

---

If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge but would still like to receive the Designary newsletter, you can manage your subscription preferences in your account settings.