Start with Empathy

So I'm going to give you a quick sort of whistle stop tour of some of the products and services that we're trying to build in our team. So first, we've even started that. And one of my big take home messages today is whatever you are building, whether it be accessibility related or any kind of problem for people, you start with empathy and trying to understand people. So we regularly run focus groups and research with the local disability community. Whenever we are testing products, we make sure that those products are tested and we're getting feedback. We're making sure that many people in our team and across the research function are having that exposure and like learning firsthand from people. The experience of traveling and actually that firsthand experience is really vital when you are building product. Secondly, I spend a lot of my time engaging disability communities around the world. So this is a photo of an open house that we did in Los Angeles where effectively we had decent amounts of food and drink and had an open invite to the local disability community just to come hear about our work and where I could be really transparent about A, the challenges that we face and B, what our bigger picture and roadmap is just to get the community really excited about what we're trying to do and, and feel like they're part of the journey as well. And so a lot of that research and that empathy and that direct contact of people allowed us to build a roadmap of what we can actually build. And so again, first thing we did when we got there, there was this one wheelchair accessible tick box that you know, is very difficult to understand. So we took that out and replaced it with all the different filters that we once had previously, many of which we had at a commable but were adapted for Airbnb. So again, things like roll in showers, grab rails, all the different features that were once on a commable, these were sort of adapted to be within Airbnb. Now with Airbnb, hosts create listings and they can add photos in order to prove things. So one of the things that we did when we first started was in order for hosts to be able to understand what they could select, we made it mandatory to add a photo. So if you say that you have a grab rail or a roll in shower, you can only tick the box by adding a photo. So this is just some screenshots of how it looks. Now for hosts where they get some in product education, they have to add photos and we provide some training about what exactly they need to do. And again, this was a really good example of it's a complex engineering challenge to rebuild a lot of photography uploading systems, but also making sure that we can do this with our users in mind that they can do this also with an ability to understand what accessibility is if you're a host. Again, as a legacy system, Airbnb had a lot of accessibility information where there was not photography. So we ran a retro or we are running a retrospective exercise where we are asking hosts to add photos or have accessibility information deselected from their listing. And while that might sound pretty kind of acute and harsh, sort of our, our belief is we want to have a really good service where even if there are less listings, we'd rather have them really accurate with really good photography. So again, this is just a little, a few, a few screenshots of what host see now when they are asked to add photos or face information being deselect accessibility information being deselected from the listing. And again that's been a great prompt to make sure that photography is there before a lot of accessibility information on the listing was pretty hidden and not very easily discoverable. We've bumped that to the top when it's now much easier to find. And also we did a whole load of engineering work where if somebody does stay at a listing and we know that they've searched using the accessibility filters, they will get a follow up review questionnaire afterwards asking about their stay and whether all the accessibility features that they thought were in the listing, whether they were actually there or not. And again, it's just been really popular with guests to be able to have that review flow tailored to them. And then finally as mentioned, we're asking hosts to add photographs to their listing and we're still thinking a lot about how do we make sure even those photographs are as good as possible. So one of my most like favorite projects this year is where we've actually partnered with disability community groups in the Bay Area and we've been working with their membership in a pilot program where we've been paying them to review photos on listings for us and in order to give feedback to the host. So this was a short two month pilot that we ran earlier in the year, but it was really popular and again we got great feedback from people with the lived experience because yeah, they know what they need as somebody with accessibility needs and we're able to provide really good feedback on photography.