Airbnb Instructor & Learner Guides
Role: Instructional Designer
Timeline: 1 week
Tools: InDesign
Stakeholders: CS Training
Problem: Our team was undergoing a curriculum redesign and moving in the direction of having learner and instructor guides for onboarding content. We needed a template!
Outcome: I delivered an InDesign template that met our needs for both learners and instructors.
Prep
I looked at examples of existing user guides from other companies to get an idea of what I liked, what might work for us, and what wouldn’t for our needs. I referenced organizations known for their quality training experiences, like Apple, and also looked at how other organizations within Airbnb were documenting things.
I sketched out several designs on paper, shared the sketches with my manager — who gave his feedback — and then I got to work in InDesign.
Development
There were a few things that were important to us:
Every lesson needed a lesson heading with the lesson’s goal, time, participants, and a description of what the learners should expect.
We needed to include Learner information in the Instructor’s Guide in a way that was clear to the instructor.
Trainers wanted clear discussion points to wrap-up every lesson.
We wanted to find a clever way to incorporate the Airbnb Customer Service Credo, which had several “best practices” we wanted to pepper throughout the learning experience.
The attached lesson exemplifies how each of these are incorporated into the template.
What I’d do differently today:
The salmon of it all…
It’s the company’s brand color — and the color we were using in our Non-Trip Training at the time — but if I could do it again, I’d make more sparing use of the brand’s hero color so the program is easier on the eyes.
She’s so verbose!
I was still so determined to show everyone I could write training content, I didn’t know how to edit my training content. Less is more! The attached guide would be significantly shorter if I were rewriting it today.
Accessibility
Because we were making these to print, I didn’t think a lot about the readability of the doc beyond the printed page. I’d spend a lot more time considering the potential implications of a screen reader on my PDF — and color contrast — if I was redesigning this today.