Airbnb

Designed a learning and engagement solution for Airbnb's Professional Photo Service, which makes photography available to any Airbnb host in the world.   

Improved both the host and guest experiences by harnessing the power of photography to bring increased consistency, trust, and humanity to the platform.  

Context

Airbnb's Photography's goal is to bring professional photography to every listing on the platform, helping to increase bookings and drive revenue for both hosts and the company. Airbnb works directly with over 2,000 photographers across the world in producing between 10,000 - 20,000 shoots per month, with each reviewed individually for adherence to style and quality guidelines.

Great photography helps hosts boost their bookings and gives guests clearer expectations about the homes they'll be staying in, reducing hesitancy and friction in the booking process. 

Listings with professional photography see an average 30% increase in booking value, leading to greater revenue both for hosts and for Airbnb.

Our goal:

Reduce incoming photo sets that don't meet quality standards, requiring edit requests from the Airbnb Photography team. 

By achieving this goal, we believe we can:

Increase the quality of listing imagery across the platform, which our research shows contributes to a better guest experience.

Bring increased booking value to hosts and to Airbnb.

Reduce operational costs of the program.

Discovery

My team's task was to raise the standard of photographic quality and consistency while scaling the program to keep pace with Airbnb's hyper-growth during this period. 

Since the uniqueness of each home is what makes the experience of traveling on Airbnb so special, our goal was to highlight that uniqueness while ensuring a consistently excellent, on-brand level of photography.

One of the biggest challenges we faced was that in order to ensure photographers were available to serve Airbnb hosts all across the world, they necessarily came from a wide range of contexts with widely varying levels of experience and equipment.

Achieving a consistent look and feel across widely diverse contexts was the challenge I worked with my team to solve.

Building on Prior Solutions:  Style Guide

As a prior solution, my team and I created the Airbnb Photography Style Guide which outlines technical and stylistic image standards for photographers. These guidelines communicated best practices and how to's for the entire photography process - from shooting to editing - to ensure images across the site were aligned with the brand and showed each unique Airbnb listing in its best light. 

While the Style Guide was a great step in communicating expectations and gaining alignment with our photographers, the team also needed a way to go deeper and share information in a more flexible and responsive way.

Research

To better understand the problem I dove in to learn as much as I could about the three user groups that interact with the Professional Photo Service and its various tools and touchpoints:

Photographers, Hosts, and the Airbnb Photography team.

1. Interviews 

I conducted interviews with:

• Airbnb photographers from a diverse range of countries, backgrounds, and skill levels.
• Photography Reviewers on the Airbnb Team.
• CX Agents who field issues related to the Photography Program from both hosts and photographers. 

2. Contextual Inquiry

I shadowed Airbnb photographers on shoots in the San Francisco Bay area, observing everything I could about their working habits, interactions with hosts, pain points, and everything else I could learn along the way. 

3. Photographing Listings

Drawing on my own background as a professional photographer, I followed the Airbnb Photographer’s journey:

1. Communication with hosts (scheduling, preparation, etc.)
2. The shoot 
3. Editing / Post-Production
4. Uploading images to the Airbnb system
5. Having the jobs accepted and receiving payment OR
6. Receiving edit requests from Airbnb team, making edits, and reuploading. 
7. Receiving payment.

Research Insights

Pain points for Airbnb

Cost 
The photo review process takes a large amount of time and labor, requiring a team of specialists to review each set and communicate directly with photographers regarding quality and style.

Redundancy
With 10,000 - 20,000 shoots coming in per month, the team was struggling to keep up with the volume without letting quality slip. They reported feeling increasingly stressed by the ever-growing backlog, and frustrated at how often they needed to make the same types of requests for common issues.

Unhappy hosts
The photo review process can be lengthy, creating a delay for hosts to receive the images of their listings. Since hosts are the backbone of Airbnb, their happiness is important. 

Lack of brand consistency
Inconsistencies in photographic quality and style lead to a lack of consistent brand image. 

Pain points for Photographers

Inconsistent Feedback 
Feedback and edit requests often came from different reviewers and standards sometimes felt inconsistent.

Lack of understanding about how their images were falling short
Photographers wanted clearer guidance about how to improve their work. 

Slow Process
Many photographers reported frustration with how long the review process took. This rang true both for highly rated photographers whose jobs rarely required edit requests, but especially so for lower-rated photographers since each round of edits and re-submissions further drew out the process and delayed their payments.

Pain points for Hosts

Delays in receiving images 
Large photo-review backlog leads to slow turnaround times, and leaves hosts waiting weeks, sometimes months, to receive the new photos for their listings.

Unhappiness with quality
Hosts in areas with few photographers don’t have many options if they receive lower quality pro photos, since Airbnb either has to accept sub-par images from the photographer since another isn’t available, or leave the hosts to use their own images.

Solution

After immersing myself to understand user needs and analyzing them within Airbnb's business context, I designed a solution that focused on improving photographer skill level with a targeted and responsive learning platform.

The Pro Learning Guides raised photo quality across the platform, directly leading to more listings receiving high quality imagery, and an increase in revenue for both hosts and the company. It also brought down program costs by reducing time spent on the photography review process. 

The Pro Learning Guides were tailored specifically to the technical needs of our photographer community, with a new module shared monthly. This format made the program adaptable and responsive to the technical issues Photography Reviewers saw most frequently on incoming images.

Drawing on my own experience as a teacher as well as a photographer, I broke down the technical material as simply as possible, focusing each module on real-life examples and using ample imagery and simple, clear language.

Photographer goals this solution supports:

Spend less time per job.

Feel supported and valued in their work.

By better supporting photographer’s learning and growth we can reduce the number of edit requests they receive from the Airbnb Photography team, leading to less total time spent per job. Photographers told us this mattered to them a lot since they are paid a fixed rate per shoot.

The more time a photographer spends on multiple rounds of edits, the less likely they are to feel satisfied with their work and stay with the company. 

Airbnb goals this solution supports:

Improve quality.

Increase the number of professionally photographed listings.

Reduce the time photo reviewers spend making individual edit requests.

By designing solutions to help better train photographers we can reduce the number of edit requests the Airbnb team needs to make, and support to a greater number of listings being professionally photographed. 

Why is this important?
Edit requests take a long time: Reviewers assess each image and identify specific issues that need correction before a set can be accepted for the site, and provide technical guidance on how to make those changes. 

The review team reported feeling increasingly unable to keep up with the growing backlog, and frustrated at the need to make the same requests for common issues time and time again. They wanted ways to share information and how-to's with photographers more broadly, to reduce time spent on individual correspondence about quality issues and technical instruction.

Business Impact of unhappy, underperforming photographers: 

The churn created by unhappy photographers results in photographer availability gaps in markets. Improving the photographer experience by supporting their development will lead to a more robust, stable, and skilled photographer pool. A robust photographer pool leads to more listings being photographed, ultimately leading to better outcomes for hosts, guests, and Airbnb. 

Wouldn't the churn of lower-performing photographers be a good thing for overall quality?
In locations with an ample supply of photographers, the churn of lower-performers wouldn’t pose a problem since it would result in a higher quality level on average. Though within Airbnb's context, it does pose a problem since many of the 5+ million active listings on the platform are in locations that don’t currently have large pools of highly trained photographers. 

Supporting Photographers by investing in their growth not only shows them we value them and their work, it also makes financial sense.
With an average 30% increase in booking revenue for listings with professional photography, each successful shoot creates increased revenue both for hosts and for Airbnb. This is all made possible by our photographers, who are critical partners in creating value for hosts and the company.

Results

Within 6 months of the launch of Airbnb Photography Pro Learning, we measured:

• A 27% decrease in image sets requiring one or more requests for revision.
• A 33% increase in the average number of jobs the photography review team reviewed per week. 

These improvements led to an overall increase in photo quality across the platform, which created a better booking experience for guests and equated to increased revenue for hosts and for Airbnb.