Airbnb's Icons is a new collection of experiences hosted by big names in music, film, television, arts, sports, and more. Current entertainment-focused Icons include a floating replica of the house from 'Up', a night in a VIP lounge with Kevin Hart, and a living room performance from Doja Cat. The experiences are all priced at under $100 per guest. Only a limited number of requests will be selected for each experience via a lottery. Airbnb also rolled out other new features this week, including the ability for groups of guests to more easily book trips together.
Airbnb's latest initiative, “Icons”, features a series of unique experiences curated in collaboration with notable figures from music, film, art, and sports. For example, guests could enjoy an evening at a secret speakeasy designed by comedian Kevin Hart. The program launches with 11 such experiences, each accessible through a digital lottery system. Most of these experiences are offered for free or at a nominal cost of less than $100. In 2024, over 4,000 digital golden tickets will be used. Airbnb is potentially setting a new trend in how tech platforms can bridge the gap between digital interaction and real-world experiences.
Airbnb improved its website's accessibility by implementing font scaling, allowing users to adjust text size independently from page zoom. Unlike browser zoom, which can create layout issues on smaller screens, font scaling only affects text elements, providing a better user experience for those with low vision. Airbnb used rem units for font sizing, as they are relative to the root element and provide more consistent scaling than em units.
Companies like Airbnb rely on AI and social media influencers to create unique immersive experiences.
Airbnb faced challenges upgrading its massive React codebase due to dependency management and performance concerns. To overcome these, its team developed a React Upgrade System that enabled incremental upgrades, module aliasing, environment targeting, and rigorous testing. The system allowed Airbnb to smoothly transition to React 18 while maintaining code quality and user experience.
Airbnb's migration from a monolithic Ruby on Rails architecture to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in 2018 was driven by the need for improved maintainability and reduced single points of failure. The company outlined four key lessons learned during this transition: invest in shared infrastructure early, simplify service dependencies, centralize data hydration, and separate UI logic from backend logic. This article discusses the transition and compares Airbnb's architectural choices with those of other tech giants like Meta, Google, and Uber.
In order to build value propositions that really resonate with your target customer segments, you need to understand what they are doing today (and why that method sucks). Airbnb's series of 8 commercials explain when and why it's the better choice for a particular group of people, for a particular subset of trips. This post includes a brief teardown of positioning and messaging for each of the 8 Airbnb commercials.
Traditional management techniques for scaling startups are fundamentally flawed and detrimental to founder-led success. This post highlights Brian Chesky's experience at Airbnb, where following conventional wisdom led to disastrous results, prompting him to develop a new approach. This new approach, "founder mode," is characterized by closer engagement with the company, even at the detail level, and a willingness to break conventional norms.
Airbnb manages the challenge of idempotency in payment processing by coordinating both client and server systems to avoid double charges, despite the technical impossibility of "exactly-once" delivery in distributed systems. Airbnb's approach involves splitting requests into phases and ensuring mutual exclusion to handle retries effectively.
The article discusses the importance of design systems from a developer's perspective, emphasizing how they can enhance usability and streamline the development process. It begins with an analogy comparing the intuitive experience of riding a bicycle to the desired user experience in software applications. Just as riding a bike becomes second nature, the goal is to create software that users can navigate effortlessly. Design systems are presented as a solution to achieve this level of usability, allowing teams to build and ship applications quickly while maintaining consistency through standardized components. The piece highlights the potential pitfalls of poorly implemented design systems, which can hinder rather than help development. It stresses the need to treat design systems as products that require ongoing investment and maintenance to remain effective. A well-maintained design system can provide stability and speed up development, while a neglected one can lead to technical debt and inefficiencies. The article advocates for an iterative approach to building design systems, contrasting it with the traditional waterfall method. Developers are encouraged to focus on simplicity and to build design systems incrementally, using user feedback to guide improvements. The example of Slack illustrates this point, showing how the company managed to standardize its components without sacrificing development speed, ultimately leading to the creation of Slack Kit. Another critical aspect discussed is the necessity of maintaining design systems to prevent them from becoming obsolete. Developers often express skepticism about using design systems due to past experiences with poorly maintained products. The article suggests that design systems should be flexible and adaptable, allowing for both standardization and customization. The Spotify design system, Encore, is cited as an example of balancing consistency with the need for creative freedom. The importance of alignment between developers and designers is also emphasized. Effective communication and collaboration can prevent wasted effort and ensure that both teams are working towards the same goals. The article uses Airbnb's experience to illustrate how a shared visual language can enhance productivity and consistency across teams. Finally, the article encourages viewing design systems as basecamps for exploration rather than constraints on creativity. By providing a stable foundation, design systems can empower developers and designers to innovate and experiment without losing sight of consistency and usability. The piece concludes by promoting UXPin Merge as a tool that facilitates the creation of production-ready prototypes, further enhancing the design and development workflow.