Airbnb Payments – Internship

During my summer internship, I worked on a 12-week design project on the Airbnb Payments team. With a global reach over 190 countries, and processing payments in over 70 different currencies, working on the Airbnb Payments team was a unique opportunity make an impact at scale.

Due to NDA restrictions, I cannot disclose all details about my project.
Please contact me for more information at clairedycat.kantner@gmail.com.

The challenge

At the start of this project, we spoke to Airbnb business unit users (BU users) who told about their struggle creating incentives. The take away: creating and tracking incentives is a mess. They have to navigate a lengthy and fragmented ecosystem. From consulting over 15 different stakeholders, to tracking steps through spreadsheets and long email chains, launching your own program takes several weeks.

With such a lengthy process, mistakes are bound to happen. In 2017, the company risked losing almost $3 million over a coupon program, as a minimum spend was accidentally not applied.

To help prevent human errors like this, I worked with the payments team to identify a better solution.

How might we empower BU users to launch high quality incentives programs with ease and confidence?

Design principles

The approach

In order to design a better journey for BU users, I had to talk with Payments Legal, Business Intelligence, and the Risk/Finance teams to understand what information is necessary to collect for review and approval. Additionally, my engineering team supported me in figuring out what designs would be feasible for implementation.

Final designs

After several iterations and getting feedback through user testing, I was able to deliver a streamlined approach to creating incentives.

Before BU users begin the incentives onboarding flow, I made sure to set expectations and demystify the steps of the incentives journey through a series of introductory modals.

On our first page, we give a visual treatment to the three offerings (cash, credit, or coupon), and provide tips to help you choose the one that works best for you, such as benefits, limitations, and examples that have already been launched.

Setting and monitoring a budget is crucial to the success of an incentive, but not everyone is aware of the technical terminology surrounding payments. To make the process less scary, I ensured clicking on each field would reveal additional clarification.

For extra precaution, we make sure to allow multiple watchers to receive notifications when budget spending reaches a specific percent or ammount.

At the end of the internship, I explored having a dashboard to further track the statuses of your incentive programs, as BU users may be monitoring several programs at once.

Overview of my contributions

Takeaways

While this was my first time working for a larger tech company, navigating through various industry standards allowed me to grow significantly. By regularly meeting with content strategists, user researchers, engineers, and other critical stakeholders, I was able to balance my design to account for multiple cross-functional needs. From enriching my understanding of the problem space by testing my prototype with users across the world, to teaming up with a kick-ass engineering team to see my designs come to life, my time at Airbnb truly made 2019 my favorite summer yet!