We take pictures, film videos, and talk to our families and friends when traveling. But those traveling experiences remain fragmentary, and it so often fails to remain in your mind as one cohesive memory—one story that you can take back home. In this new Airbnb mobile application, every user is an author; every post is their journal.
With an easy voice command, authors can easily record sounds or videos, take photos, and create a journal that can be shared with your co-authors or any other people.
This page is still under construction.
We created a moodboard and collected inspirations that helped us designing the look and feel of our application. Some keywords and phrases that could characterize these images would include "getting in touch with inner self again," "retro style," "personal connections," and "finding values in the process."
Our design was also visually inspired by "brunch," a Korean mobile platform that uses a book metaphor to display blog contents. We liked how this metaphor fits our direction for design in terms of its retro sensibility, and we believe having various "books" could be our analogy of making users finding values in the process.
The UI design of editorial contents in fashion-related services also grabbed our attention. Their minimal design language and clean-cut edges draw users' attention to the main contents instead of subsidiary information.
Using the speech recognition in XD, we created a prototype that recognizes user's voice commands. For instance, let's say Janice, an imaginary user, is visiting Beijing and has just witnessed the Forbidden City for the first time. Janice wants to quickly record her impression that she'll use later to create a journal in our app and post it. If she could carry out all these tasks in one platform, it'll save several clicks and some mental effort.
Our voice command interface enables users to quickly navigate the app and do what they want. There are also tabs that show recommended commands, which might be based on their usual commands. Clicking one of these could save even more time.
People's stories are organized based on the locations. This would be convenient for people who are thinking about traveling to a new city but are looking for more personal and deeper stories that are hard to find in many media-focused social media.
AirBnB is a service that mainly connects people offering places to stay and people who are looking for places. People can look for other users' ratings and reviews to help making their decision on whether to stay there or not. We believe that linking AirBnB's current service to the storytelling platform could make the original service much more appealing to users by adding a personal, emotional touch.
We believe that every author has an equal right to their content. Only after every co-author confirms the final draft, the journal will be published and become available to the public.