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For Airbnb, trust is everything.
After all, Airbnb requires a leap of faith on both the guest and host sides. You are inviting a complete stranger under your own roof or spending a night in someone else’s home!
This need for a leap of faith makes trust a cornerstone of Airbnb’s design process. They even have a whole page dedicated to trust reassurance.
In this article, I’ll summarise two key points from Joe Gebbia’s TED Talk titled How Airbnb designs for trust.
1. Reputation beats similarity
The similar-to-me effect is a natural human bias that makes us trust people similar to us. The more different someone is from us, the harder it’s to trust them.
However, according to Airbnb’s research, we trust people with high reputations more than anyone else. In the case of Airbnb, a high reputation was defined as 10+ positive reviews.
Knowing that, Airbnb focused greatly on maximising both the number and trustworthiness of reviews on the platform.
One of the ways to achieve that is by revealing reviews only after both sides have left one. It incentives both guests and hosts to leave reviews (in order to get one), and makes leaving truthful reviews easier by eliminating the chance of the other side giving you a bad review just because you left a bad one.
2. The right amount of disclosure
The right amount of trust takes the right amount of disclosure.
People who disclose too little during their interaction with the host are accepted less often. It’s hard to trust someone who shares so little.
It works the other way around, too. People who are excessively open and share too much in their first interaction can scare off other people.
There’s a sweet spot between sharing too little and sharing too much. Disclosing just the right amount of information on the first interaction maximises trust and the host’s willingness to accept a booking.
But how do you design for the right amount of disclosure? By guiding users. Airbnb does that twofold by:
- Text box size. The size of the message box gives a perspective on how long a potential message should be. It encourages writing more than one sentence while showing that it’s not a space for an essay.
- Prompts. Instead of leaving users on their own to figure out what to write, Airbnb uses data to analyse what messages with the highest acceptance rate include and further prompts new users to include this information via bullet points.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16cM-RFid9U
Watch the full talk
Joe Gebbia’s TED Talk on designing for trust
