MyPlace
Background
MyPlace started out as a web-based platform that connects you to places to stay and people to rent your place to within a trusted network of people you already know. Because contact syncing is essential to building these trusted networks, an iOS app with thoughtful and intentional design was the next step in building out the product.
Problem statement
How might we make home-sharing more casual and flexible, but based on trust and personal connection?
User Stories
Existing solutions
Home-sharing is not a new concept, and there are a plethora of ways to find a place to stay while traveling. However, there’s a clear unmet need with these booking platforms that people are trying to solve organically through social media apps. They get the job done, but they aren’t really built for this problem, so there are clear pain points with these solutions.
Design goals
Emphasize people over places
One of the key differentiators of MyPlace is that it's about your own personal network (people you know + friends of friends). It was important to encourage users to sync their contacts to find as many people that they know as possible, and build in natural mechanisms for sharing links and inviting their friends.
Keep it casual and flexible
It was clear from the existing behavior on social media platforms that the low friction, flexible nature of posting to a story, feed, or message thread made it easier for people to post their place and have more flexibility around dates and pricing. People are often determining price based on how well they knew their guest and how long they were staying, and are sometimes interested in non-monetary exchange types like swapping or petsitting.
Foster trust & accountability
Because renting your place to someone you might not know can feel risky, it was important to provide consistent contextual tags for how people know each other and are connected. We focused on emphasizing the person on the other side at every step of the journey, with profiles that show social media links, mutual contacts, and a "Close Friends" feature.
Facilitate the process of connection
For first time guests or those who aren't professional hosts, there are some key guidelines that can make the process feel much smoother and less risky. We helped people through the process with prompts, smart defaults, helpful reminders, and clear next steps. There were several key searching and sharing loops that we focused on to promote more engagement and interaction.
Highlights
In the onboarding flow, our main goal was to get people to sync their contacts, as that was a key part of the experience. Emphasizing the importance of the network and the parameters for privacy helped us get a 77% opt-in rate for syncing.
From the beginning, people are highlighted, not places. Seeing your friends' faces on a map is a wow moment for users - that familiarity helps build trust in the network.
Creating a place is meant to feel fun, lightweight, and personal to you. We added in smart defaults to reduce friction and create an endowment effect.
Hosts are able to choose from exchange types that are non-monetary, such as "offer as a gift" or "other," allowing for exchanges that don't feel as transactional. Instead of fixed pricing, hosts can write a blurb about their pricing structure or exchange.
If users search for a place but can't find exactly what they're looking for, they can easily create a post that will broadcast to their network to help them find something.
In the search suggestions and results, we highlight how many people you might know in a certain city, focusing again on the network and how many mutuals you have in common, not the place.