Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

ELIMINATING THE MIDDLEMAN
I like to use the comparison of Craigslist and Airbnb to bring this home. Comparing the
user experiences between related sites or apps has been a wellspring of knowledge for me
in my career, offering many “aha!” moments about the kinds of user needs I should be
thinking about and how newer technologies might allow for a significant enhancement in
experience. One of those was the first time I used Airbnb. Both Craigslist and Airbnb
allow user transactions, with Craigslist of course being a pioneer in this kind of service.
The technology Craig Newmark used to build his site in 1995 and that which the designers
of Airbnb took advantage of more than a decade later offer starkly contrasting
experiences. If you look up the timeline for the introduction of the various versions of
HTML, you’ll see that the first version became available only a few years before
Craigslist.org was registered. Craig Newmark was a brilliant early adopter. By contrast,
Airbnb debuted in 2008, the same year as the iPhone 3G and the first public working draft
of HTML5.
The enormity of how new contextual awareness through technology would change
UX, like those offered by Airbnb, happened to me midsummer four years ago. A group of
my close friends and I had planned a vacation to exchange the sweltering concrete jungle
of New York City for a real jungle. We planned to stay at a friend’s house in Puerto Rico,
which was available for free, making the trip super cheap. We arrived in San Juan in the
late morning and set off for our friend’s house. But when we got there we saw that several
windows had been broken, and when we went inside we discovered that many of the
appliances were missing and the place had been trashed. Great—my friend had been
robbed. There was no way we could stay there, so we suddenly needed a place for thirteen
people to stay that night, within driving distance, for a nominal fee. So to my iPhone I
went, expecting to have to answer a bunch of questions to narrow the search down to our
needs, if we’d even be able to find options. I’d heard of Airbnb but hadn’t ever used the
app. When I opened it and navigated to the search box, my eye was drawn right to a blue
bar above the search field, which was in fact the only bit of color on the whole page. That
was good UX design pulling my eyes to the spot. Amazingly, as though the app had read
my mind, it announced, “Help! I need a place, tonight!” and displayed a list of available
places to rent.
Airbnb has developed an advanced website for both mobile and desktop in addition
to native Android and iOS apps that make use of HTML5 Geolocation, CSS3, AJAX, and
JavaScript. Its native apps also make use of SMS to reliably deliver messages to users’
phones and GPS to automatically offer geolocated search results. For my search that day,
just one of my phone’s many sensors was used to tell the Airbnb database which of its
properties to search for. The site has been programmed to “understand” that when people
search on it, they’re looking for a place to stay, and it starts from the assumption that the
place needed is in the location the searcher is currently at. We found a place within the
hour and were on our way to what would become a great vacation. From that moment
forward I was an avid Airbnb user.
Now think about Craigslist. The site has remained largely the same as when it
debuted. Each layer of the Craigslist experience sits on the backbone of the original
HTML, and that’s by no means particularly fancy. The site hasn’t been upgraded to take