Airbnb PSB Redesign
Context
In 2017 H2, I redesigned the PSB flow for global users to improve clarity and efficiency of the flow.
PSB stands for Public Secure Bureau. Chinese government requires Airbnb to collect Government ID info for traveler to China. To comply with this regulation, hotels scan all guests passport at check-in. Since we can’t rely on hosts to do this for logistics and privacy reasons, we’re asking guests to fill in this info during booking.
Audit the current flow
I started with auditing the current PSB flow and understanding how the flow works.
We will ask all guests booking a listing in China to provide certain information (name, nationality, and passport number/expiry or China national ID number) for all persons staying at the listing -- the primary booker’s information is required, but the booking can be completed without the other stayers’ information.
Identify the problems
After an audit of the current flow, I found that the flow is redundant, and sometimes user need to do repeat work:
When adding a new profile, user have to go through multi pages with only one input on each page, which is not efficient and user might drop
User have to manually select a profile every time without default
User have to manually select country without default
The description is very long, and will push down actions, especially on smaller screens
User can only select one profile each time, and need to go back and forth between ‘Guest profile‘ and ‘Select guest profile‘ page
New design
Flow improvement
Keep the user problems in mind, I redesigned the PSB flow. 3 pages were reduced for both new user (without PSB profile) and exist user (with PSB profile).
Edge cases and error handling
Besides the main flow, I also think through the edge cases and how to we handle them.
*Content is not final
Before and After
Global booking team is my stakeholder. In addition to show the audit and the new design, I also made this comparison, so we can clearly see what’s changing and what’s not.
Localization and legal content
Airbnb is connecting guest and host all over the world, it’s important to make sure the design work for all the languages. I tested my design with German, Chinese and Japanese.
As I mentioned in user problems section, the old PSB flow show the full description as legal team required. However, it’s not friendly for long character languages, such as German and Russian and small screens. Thus I met Legal team and show them how the experience look like for those users. As a result, we aligned on rewrite part of the content and collapse it.
Results
The PSB redesign resulted in 3.1% booking lift in experiment, which is a 0.5% incremental booking lift in overall China business. Global team also adopted this design and launched the flow to 100%.