A product marketing design system
A page design language and internal tool that let non-technical employees publish beautiful pages in minutes.
Problems
1. Inconsistency is not trustworthy.
The pervasive design inconsistency of Airbnb’s product marketing pages is more than just an aesthetic disappointment for a global travel brand. When user trust is crucial to your product, content that looks potentially fraudulent directly hurts both guest and host conversion.
2. High eng effort required.
The high engineering effort needed to create/edit hand-built pages means a lot of public messaging is launched late or never.
Users
General audience
Anyone trying to learn about Airbnb’s offerings
Airbnb employees publishing content without engineering support, especially non-designers
Specific audience for initial effort
Anyone considering hosting their home on Airbnb, especially those of moderate intent
Role
I led the hands-on experience design and some cross-functional coordination with a PM, a junior designer, a content strategist, a researcher, and 3–4 engineers.
I created and led presentations to Airbnb leaders.
Inconsistency is not trustworthy: an audit of host-facing product marketing pages.
Part 1: Start narrow and broaden—
To ensure a system will generate quality results, create great designs for a specific need and extract a system from them.
I was part of a Host Growth team that owned the landing pages for potential hosts. They have many questions and we strongly believed more would host if provided more information up front. But we didn’t yet know what content would perform best; we needed to test and iterate quickly. These were our specific user needs to test and ensure quality outputs.
Selecting specific content to test
Direct research identified the top motivators and concerns for the largest host segments; search traffic confirmed these findings. We planned 6–8 pages, one for each major subject, and decided to test first with 3: Money (the top motivator), Safety (the top concern), and Getting Started which also showed very high interest/traffic.
We gathered from existing but buried content for these three subjects and edited the copy for consistent voice and pacing. We considered various story lengths and included both informational and inspirational content.
Some brand explorations —
Some safely on brand and others stretching the boundaries.
User research—
Our schedule allowed for one round of potential host interview research with participants from two of Airbnb’s largest markets, the U.S. and France.
The vast majority of subjects said that the presence of these pages was reassuring and would make them more likely to start hosting and to start sooner.
We were not surprised that most participants only scanned headlines until they found subjects of high personal interest.
Testimonials were the most compelling content overall. But knowing that others host happily and successfully led most participants to be curious about the specific details of how they ran their hosting business. This led us to greatly expand the testimonials into mini host interviews.
A few participants identified specific questions they had but declined to even scan the pages during the interview. Interestingly, they still said the presence of the pages furthered their consideration of hosting. We didn’t know how much the interviewer’s presence influenced their behavior, but it did inspire discussions of a chatbot or other natural language search features.
Detailed exploration examples—
Testimonial module
Mobile nav
Initial launch pages—
A landing page and topic pages on setup, safety, and money. All immediately subject to further experiment, of course.
Live site >
Part 2: Start broad and narrow down—
To ensure a system will serve most needs, survey all needs and refine down.
I started by auditing dozens of existing high-traffic product marketing pages from Airbnb, similar competitive marketplaces and other prominent tech companies.
From these, I conducted a similar process of finding design needs and patterns that appeared repeatedly, comparing and evaluating the differences to create modules that we felt were the strongest and most flexible.
The module set at launch —
How a page is built—
Taken from an employee educational site I made for the system.
