When the travel industry came to a sudden halt in 2020, Airbnb was faced with the challenge of reimagining the way we travel. With local stays and remote work becoming a new norm, our Guest Experience team quickly innovated to meet the needs of our community.
Join us on June 8th at 12pm PST to hear how our Guest Experience team reengineered our products and processes to make advancements in Flexible Date Search, Search Ranking, Prototyping, and Server Driven UI to develop a new platform that fits the travel of today!
With more people working from home and having greater freedom to choose when to travel, we knew we needed to re-engineer our platform to fit this way of life. To do that we developed the “Flexible Dates” feature. Flexible Dates allows guests to browse more options while staying flexible on the exact dates of their trip. In this talk we’ll share how we re-engineering our search experience to build new ways for our guests to input their flexibility preferences.
To make Flexible Dates possible, the Relevance team had to adapt our traditional approach to ranking which was historically built for a fixed date range for all listings in search results. In this talk we’ll share how we determined the best available date range for each listing, and how we tackled the cold-start ranking problem while comparing listings with different date ranges.
As we developed new features such as Flexible Dates to meet the growing needs of our community, we needed a way to rapidly ship new features and changes across all product surfaces. To do this we built a general, robust and extensible server-driven UI system. This system enables engineers to rapidly and easily ship backwards compatible, full featured products across web, iOS & Android. In this talk we’ll provide a deep look into how this system works, and how we’re continuing to scale improvements for the future.
When Airbnb took on the challenge of re-engineering travel, we iterated rapidly with prototyping. Prototyping is a design and development process that enables faster iterations, more effective decision making and ultimately better products for users.
This talk focuses on what prototyping at Airbnb looks like. We will share the benefits of prototyping, the process we follow and the tooling we developed to enable prototyping. This talk will also show a real world example about what we did prototyping in the launch of flexible dates search.
As we move towards SDUI(Server Driven UI) to iterate rapidly and launch features quickly across Web, iOS, and Android, we also need to ensure every released server side change is safe for all platforms.
To ensure a reliable user experience for our customers, we’ve evolved our release deployment process in various ways to accommodate the quick evolution of our platform. In this talk, we’ll walk through how release deployment in Airbnb is developed to catch possible regressions before bad changes hit production with minimal frictions.