The Importance of User Testing
Airbnb: A Case Study
Airbnb is one of the most popular companies for those looking to travel without looking for a hotel room. The company allows homeowners to rent out their homes to people going on vacation, but they nearly went bankrupt because they did not consider their user base and what they actually found relevant. This story and more are on the NPR podcast How I Built This, hosted by Guy Raz.
When the company just started out, they focused on providing lodging for conferences. The conference that they launched the new website for had six listings, but only two were booked, and one was by the co-founder Brian. This could be explained by a number of factors, and the one that the founders settled on was that exchanging money in person was awkward.
Although the company had positive press because of how it solved a lodging problem with a Presidential speech at a conference, Airbnb had to support itself by racking up credit card debt and selling novelty repackaged cereal. It took the founders flying out to their earliest adopters to get into the underlying issues of why their product was not succeeding.
The first issue was that their adopters did not know how to take interesting pictures that would make people want to stay there. This was easily resolved by having the company provide a photography service to its users.
The second, and far more serious, was that customers using the website to book a stay found navigation almost impossible. This meant that there were many people who wanted to book stays in Airbnbs, but gave up because they found the website too infuriating to actually book a stay.
The founders of Airbnb have a philosophy called “enlightened empathy,” describing it as putting themselves in the shoes of their users so they can see the world how they see it - also known as user testing. A common problem when designing a website or interface is that the people who work on it get used to how it works and can navigate it easily, but the people who haven’t worked on it find it confusing and easily get lost. User testing means you get someone who is unfamiliar with your website and see how they navigate through it, identifying places where you need to rearrange or streamline options. This process is essential for your business - if the buyers cannot use or buy your product, you cannot sell your product, and your company will die.
Once Airbnb was able to fix their user experience problems, the company expanded to hold a large amount of market share for online booking and vacation accommodation.