With over 1,000,000 photographs of 200,000 listings all over the world (192 countries to be exact), finding the perfect vacation on Airbnb was no easy task. Some filters, like city, may have be an obvious way to start a search, but it wasn’t easy to navigate (or even discover) the various types of unique accommodations the site offered. Should you stay in a Yurt? Castle? Houseboat? Cave House?
To help users navigate through the plethora of options, Airbnb has unveiled a new visual-based design, ‘Wish Lists,’ to help people discover all of the unique properties the site has to offer:
Wish Lists transform the Airbnb platform from one that simply enables search and booking to one that empowers its members to explore an array of remarkable spaces, discover their friends’ favourite listings, and plan their own dream trips. Wish Lists give users a deeply visual way to browse Airbnb listings while allowing them to seamlessly create their own fully customised lists.
As if taking a cue from the popularity of the Pinterest-based browsing model, users can ‘heart’ their favourite properties and save them to Wish Lists categorized by any way they choose- geography, theme, price-point. Wish Lists can be kept private or made public for sharing and providing inspiration for others.
Users can also browse public wish lists for inspiration- Jack Dorsey of Twitter has curated an ‘Across The Sea‘ wish list while actor Ashton Kutcher has created a ‘Modern Getaways‘ wish list. Airbnb has also created themed wish lists to make searching easier- ‘Paleo‘ gives a snapsot of the top stone homes, ‘Royal Treatment‘ details all the castles on the site, and ‘Grape Expectations‘ lists top spots for wine enthusiasts.
Joe Gebbia, Airbnb Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, speaks to the significance of the shift to a more visual, design based site:
For the first time, we’ve shifted from being search-based to browse-based. We’ve finally surfaced all this amazing content, which for the longest time was hidden behind search…We thought deeply about how sharing not only empowers trips, but also fuels discovery and inspiration. Where else can users build their own aspirational lists that contain Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, the iconic Tower of London and castles owned by the Borges family? With Wish Lists, we’ve not only transformed Airbnb to illustrate our passion for design, we’ve woven social into this product from the ground up, so discovering, creating, and sharing Wish Lists is a simple, sleek experience for users.
To create a Wish List, simply sign-in to your Airbnb account and start ‘hearting’ all of the unique properties you’d like to visit! We’re got our heart set on staying in this refurbished 1965 Boeing 727 in Costa, Rica.
Watch a video about how Wish Lists works below:
via PSFK
