Airbnb has redesigned its site with major changes to its design and product since its original launch in 2008. The site now focuses on images and the photography of Airbnb locations. Airbnb also released a new feature-Wish Lists. Airbnb is an online service that matches people seeking vacation rentals and other short-term accommodations with those with rooms to rent, generally private parties that are not professional hoteliers. Wish Lists is a new way to discover amazing, unique spaces on Airbnb. Wish Lists let you explore beautiful collections of spaces created by others, save your favorite spaces, and share your creations with your friends seamlessly.
The Popular Wish Lists page lets you browse through an array of inspiring spaces curated by thought leaders such as Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey, actor and entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher, and designer Yves Béhar, as well as Wish Lists created by your friends and the Airbnb community.
In an interview shared on New York Times, Brian Chesky, co-founder and chief executive of Airbnb, said the new design happened almost by accident.
“We had these ‘stars’ on the site to save places, and we changed them to a ‘heart’ icon as an experiment,” Mr. Chesky said, noting that the experiment was shown to 1 percent of Airbnb users. “We quickly realized that people were saving these properties in a way that they hadn’t with the star icon, and that the amount of time they spent on the site went up dramatically.”
“We now have more than 1 million photos on the site taken by professional photographers, and it now feels more like a digital magazine,” Mr. Chesky said.
Users who are searching for a location can now click to save a location to a Wish List rather than clicking back and forth between spaces.
