Brian Chesky describes a "seven‑star" design framework: start from the baseline five‑star expectation and systematically imagine higher tiers (six, seven, up to ten) to reveal opportunities to delight users. He illustrates with an Airbnb check‑in example (address→door opens as five‑star; airport pickup as six; limousine with personalized touches as seven; exaggerated ten‑star of Elon Musk taking you to space) and argues teams should storyboard end‑to‑end experiences and add modest surprises across touchpoints.
You have this concept of seven star design.
Yeah. So the concept goes as follows. On the Internet, the kind of paradigm is five stars, right? So a YouTube video, Airbnb or Uber or whatever, it's five stars. And the problem with five stars is the only reason you would leave less than five stars is because it was horrible. If you rate like an Uber ride, like four stars, like, your life might have been in danger. Right. Like, in other words, the bar to do five stars is really low. But we wanted to build a product where you, you loved it so much, you would tell everyone about it. And so we thought, what if you booked an Airbnb and we sold you a product and you didn't leave five stars, but you emailed the company asking for a six star because the product was so good, you had to almost go above and beyond. And so when we designed products, we imagined, okay, this is what customers expect. They expect to have a five star experience. And then we basically asked the intellectual question, what's a five star check in experience? On Airbnb, the five star check in experience is they give you the address, you get to the house, you knock on the door and they're there and they open the door and they let you in the house. And that's five star. Four stars, as you call them, they're like five minutes away and you'll probably leave a four star. And like one star is obviously like they never showed up. So the bar is kind of low. Like, you knock on the door and they open the door. That's a really low bar. So we ask, well, what's a six star? Well, a six star is they probably pick you up at the airport. So what's a seven star review? You can actually play it. It's kind of fun. Well, seven stars, they don't pick at the airport. They send a limousine. And you open the limousine door and there's like coconut water and they know you are into surfing. And there's some surfing magazine that's a seven star. And so then what's a 10 star check in? Well, I can go to 30, but I won't because it'll be a long day. And the 10 star is you get to the airport and you're like, great, there's my ride. But you realize the person dressed in the limo suit is Elon Musk and he just takes you to space. I've exaggerated to make a point. The whole point is that if what you need to do is just find 100 people to love you, then it's very easy to take for granted. The five star is what people expect. But to build something people love, you almost need to do something more than they expect. And so every moment is an opportunity to do something slightly more than people expect. And we play this out, you go to like all the way to 10. Okay, now we're not going to do all that, but maybe suddenly six stars doesn't seem so bad. Now we should have a service airport pickup or something like that. And so we do this about almost every frame of the experience. And this also can apply to almost anything. Almost office design or how you hire people. We storyboard end to end the interviewing experience.
I think one other thing in your seven star design principle that you haven't yet captured which is really important is it's not just the webpage, it's not just the mobile app.
Yes. The product is whatever the customer's buying. The customers are not buying our website and they're not buying our application. That's just a storefront of communication. What they're buying is a house. And frankly, what they're buying, more than a house, is the host experience of hospitality, this idea of belonging. We started storyboarding the experience and realizing it's really about every moment of the experience. And we have to be responsible not just for the online part of the product, but the offline part of the product. And so that's what we did.
