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“It was a bit nuts” – Teo Connor on designing the new Airbnb app
14 May, 2025
In London and Los Angeles, Rob Alderson speaks with Teo Connor about Airbnb's new direction, her career, and the enduring influence of the girl guides.
About an hour after CEO Brian Chesky unveiled the new Airbnb app to the world, Teo Connor, the company’s VP of design, takes a moment to reflect on the 18-month project.
It’s a key move for Airbnb, which is beefing up its experiences and adding services, so people can book a private chef or a massage through the app.
And it was an enormous design challenge for Connor and her team, who had to introduce a dizzying new array of options and information into the UX.
“Yeah it was a bit nuts,” she laughs. “But I am really proud that we have been able to make something that feels both familiar and new. It feels magical to pull these three things into an app that people are used to using for one thing.”
Teo Connor
A big piece of the puzzle was to create the right building blocks that would work for both users and hosts – unglamorous but vital work to create scalable design structures.
But for a company that has design woven in its DNA – both Chesky and co-founder Joe Gebbia studied at the Rhode Island School of Design – they also had to create something that looked great too.
“We had to be able to condense all this information into three new tabs on the homescreen without it becoming overwhelming,” Connor explains. “How do you do that at scale, and at such density? But also with beauty – we had a lot of conversations about that.”
Sitting through Chesky’s presentation on a massive high-definition screen, every pixel of the new app was blown up for everyone to scrutinise. But Connor is clearly satisfied with what she, and everyone else, saw.
“We are having to educate people and change their behaviour, so that is a huge challenge,” she says. “But what I love is that when you look at it, it sort of feels inevitable.”
We’re changing travel again
Rewind a couple of hours and Brian Chesky strides onto the stage to the strains of Ini Kamoze’s Here Comes the Hotstepper.
Airbnb has pioneered a way of working that focuses the whole company on a single product calendar, and the summer release is the moment when its new additions are shared with the public.
In the past, these changes and updates have been smaller, and sometimes very technical. But this announcement fundamentally changes what Airbnb is, and does. The tagline used in the official release is, “Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.”
The audience in Los Angeles includes journalists, influencers, a phalanx of Airbnb staff and a smattering of celebrities.
Chesky – whom it feels relevant to note is ripped – speaks for about an hour, explaining the company’s origin story, and the travails of the pandemic, when they lost 80% of their business in eight weeks.
This context sets up the company’s new direction. “17 years ago we changed the way people travel, and today we are changing travel again,” he explains.
While Airbnb was launched as a more interesting alternative to bland hotels, he acknowledges that hotels provide a range of useful things that people need when they are travelling, from haircuts to massages.
Airbnb Services is an attempt to replicate those offerings on the app – the icon is a bell like those you find on hotel reception desks.
It launched across 260 cities with ten categories – chefs, prepared meals, catering, photography, personal training, massages, spa treatments, hair styling, make-up and nails.
Airbnb Experiences, which first launched in 2016, has been “reimagined from the ground up” to offer people local experiences “hosted” by people who know their cities best. It launched across 650 cities with five categories – history and culture, food and drink, nature and outdoors, art and design, and fitness and wellness.
They are also rolling out Airbnb Originals – one-off events often with a celebrity host.
One of the biggest shifts is that Airbnb wants these new categories to be used by people in their own cities as well as visitors, heralding a move from being a travel app to an experience, or community, platform.
And all of this needs a whole new design system, which is where Connor and her team of 200 designers come in.
A series of design challenges
There was an overarching design challenge – to bring these new elements into the Airbnb ecosystem in a way that felt integrated and exciting, but didn’t overshadow the accommodation offering, on which the company has built an billion business.
But below that, there were a series of “really fun design challenges” to create the spaces and interfaces that would support this new direction.
These included the new homescreen, a new profile page, a new itinerary pageand product description pages, or PDPs, which capture these myriad experiences, from historic tours to wine tasting, and bring them to life in a clear and engaging way.
“Brian really wanted the PDPs to tell a story, so you could go from the top to the bottom and really quickly discern what this thing was about,” Connor explains. “For a really long time we were talking about having video. But you have to sit back and watch a video, and it can be quite passive.”
The solution was a 2×2 grid which quickly communicates the key information, and then a design structure that allows for scanning. Elsewhere, carousels are used to help users browse the broader range of things they can get via the app.
The new Experiences flow in the app
The designs needed to strike a fine a balance – to demonstrate breadth and abundance, without sacrificing ease-of-use.
“We want people to get the information they need and then get back to doing life,” Connor says. “That’s a big thing for us when we’re designing.”
That begins, she explains, with an obsession with simplicity that underpins every design review. “We are constantly asking, do people need this? Do they want it? If no, then take it away.”
But the team also thinks a lot about the platform’s personality, “using craft and care to make the experience feel delightful.”
Chesky talked in his presentation of bringing more depth and vibrancy back to the app, moving away from the flat, and sometimes soulless, big tech experience..
There are lots of nice touches – when you press the hot air balloon icon for Experiences it belches fire, when you hit the Services bell it shakes as if summoning a concierge.
“It’s not about creating pretty things just because we can,” Connor says. “The delightful moments always have a utility behind them.”
So on the itinerary page, the check-in time has an icon showing an open door with the lights on behind; the check-out time is accompanied by a closed door with a darkened space behind it.
How did this happen?
Rewind again, and I sit down with Connor in Airbnb’s London office about six weeks before the new app goes live. You wouldn’t know that they are at the business end of such a huge project; Connor is calm and self-reflective.
I first met her back in the early 2010s, when she ran her own graphic design studio in London. She joined Apple in 2016 as a human interface designer, and moved to Airbnb in 2021.
Was this – working for some of the biggest design-led companies in technology – always the plan?
“Not at all,” she laughs. “It’s surprising and magical to me that this small-time graphic designer from London ended up here. I often ask myself – how did this happen?”
The answer, she says, involves luck and timing. But it also speaks to her willingness to say yes to new opportunities, an approach she adopted after once saying no.
During an internship at a London ad agency, someone offered Connor the chance to design flyers for a local club night. “I got totally freaked out and ghosted the opportunity,” she says. “I’ve always regretted that, not just saying yes and seeing how it went.”
She’d always been interested in creativity, often being taken as a kid to London’s museums where she would happily sketch for hours.
“I loved and admired artists,” she says. “But deep inside I knew I wasn’t one. I was a bit of a girl scout, a bit practical. I liked making things, and solving things, and helping people.”
Connor says her career has been a mix of “going with the flow and wanting to drive the flow.”
She did an art foundation course because someone she worked with doing Saturday shifts in a supermarket was doing one, and she thought it sounded interesting.
The course was “a real awakening” and introduced her to graphic design, which she’d go on to study at the University of Middlesex.
“I did bumble through life a bit, but I am driven to be good at what I’m doing,” she says. “So even though I might fall into something, once I fall into it, I want to do it the best I can.”
She admits to being “bamboozled” when Apple first got in touch. “The email felt like spam,” she laughs, “it was from hello@apple or something.”
The new Guest Profile page
While she had worked on websites before, she wasn’t a digital product designer. And she was happy in London, running her own studio amid the strong creative community that blossomed in the city at that time.
“There were all these small agencies doing really cool work and sharing resources. It was an environment I thrived in, and felt comfortable in. So the idea of leaving all that behind, and going to America where I didn’t know anyone, and I didn’t know how things worked, was very nerve-wracking.”
But the memory of the club night flyers spurred her on. “I didn’t want to be the person who says no and regrets it. So I went, and it was the best thing I ever did.”
Although she hadn’t had much exposure to digital product design, she found that her experience in wayfinding proved very useful. “With wayfinding you are thinking about how to move people though a space, with visuals and graphics, in a way that tells a story. A lot of that thinking is very similar in digital products.”
A defining time
Connor spent five years at Apple and moved to Airbnb in 2021, initially as senior director of design, before becoming a VP the following year.
She saw in Airbnb what appeared to be a very rare opportunity.
“It felt like this was going to be a defining time for the company, and that we would really be able to shape something,” she says.
It was also exciting to work for someone who was a designer before he was a founder.
“I am fortunate to have a leader who understands the value of design,” Connor says.
“For a lot of my peers who work at organisations of this scale, a lot of their job is translation, advocating for design, and trying to get a seat at the table. I never need to advocate for design with Brian – he has made space for the design team to be at the heart of the company.”
But once a designer, always a designer. Does he often give feedback on specific design details?
“Oh 100%,” Connor laughs. “He has this deep knowledge, and this great perspective, because he is looking at the whole company all of the time. But he’s always in the pixels too, asking about the radius of a button or something.”
Overseeing 200 designers can be challenging, but she sees the fundamentals as being similar to leading much smaller teams.
“I don’t think there’s a huge difference between managing five designers or managing 200, when you break it down,” she says. “The ability to build trust, to empower teams, and to be decisive, these all scale up.”
She has built a culture which revolves around courage, and says she is drawn to people who, like her, “have a point of view and speak up for what’s right.”
“I think that goes back to the Girl Guide thing again,” she says.
In a company like Airbnb, where design and business are very intertwined, does she expect her designers to understand the commercial impact of their work?
“I expect them to be curious about it, and want to learn,” Connor says. She tries to encourage this commercial awareness through, for example, inviting other teams in the business to share their insights with the design team, and mandating that project reviews include a discussion of the impact created.
“We want to make it easy for the team to understand why these things are linked, and why they’re important,” Connor explains.
More senior roles are expected to have more of this business acumen, but she doesn’t miss the days when designers often felt like they needed to have an MBA, to speak the right language.
“I want our designers to be designers, first and foremost,” she says.
Day one
Back at the Airbnb launch event, I ask Connor what happens now.
“Well, we’re going to have a really good party,” she says. “But I think we are excited to build on all this work now.
“I actually think today is like day one,” she says. “I think that’s how it feels for the company.”
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“It was a bit nuts” – Teo Connor on designing the new Airbnb app
14 May, 2025
In London and Los Angeles, Rob Alderson speaks with Teo Connor about Airbnb's new direction, her career, and the enduring influence of the girl guides.
About an hour after CEO Brian Chesky unveiled the new Airbnb app to the world, Teo Connor, the company’s VP of design, takes a moment to reflect on the 18-month project.
It’s a key move for Airbnb, which is beefing up its experiences and adding services, so people can book a private chef or a massage through the app.
And it was an enormous design challenge for Connor and her team, who had to introduce a dizzying new array of options and information into the UX.
“Yeah it was a bit nuts,” she laughs. “But I am really proud that we have been able to make something that feels both familiar and new. It feels magical to pull these three things into an app that people are used to using for one thing.”
Teo Connor
A big piece of the puzzle was to create the right building blocks that would work for both users and hosts – unglamorous but vital work to create scalable design structures.
But for a company that has design woven in its DNA – both Chesky and co-founder Joe Gebbia studied at the Rhode Island School of Design – they also had to create something that looked great too.
“We had to be able to condense all this information into three new tabs on the homescreen without it becoming overwhelming,” Connor explains. “How do you do that at scale, and at such density? But also with beauty – we had a lot of conversations about that.”
Sitting through Chesky’s presentation on a massive high-definition screen, every pixel of the new app was blown up for everyone to scrutinise. But Connor is clearly satisfied with what she, and everyone else, saw.
“We are having to educate people and change their behaviour, so that is a huge challenge,” she says. “But what I love is that when you look at it, it sort of feels inevitable.”
We’re changing travel again
Rewind a couple of hours and Brian Chesky strides onto the stage to the strains of Ini Kamoze’s Here Comes the Hotstepper.
Airbnb has pioneered a way of working that focuses the whole company on a single product calendar, and the summer release is the moment when its new additions are shared with the public.
In the past, these changes and updates have been smaller, and sometimes very technical. But this announcement fundamentally changes what Airbnb is, and does. The tagline used in the official release is, “Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.”
The audience in Los Angeles includes journalists, influencers, a phalanx of Airbnb staff and a smattering of celebrities.
Chesky – whom it feels relevant to note is ripped – speaks for about an hour, explaining the company’s origin story, and the travails of the pandemic, when they lost 80% of their business in eight weeks.
This context sets up the company’s new direction. “17 years ago we changed the way people travel, and today we are changing travel again,” he explains.
While Airbnb was launched as a more interesting alternative to bland hotels, he acknowledges that hotels provide a range of useful things that people need when they are travelling, from haircuts to massages.
Airbnb Services is an attempt to replicate those offerings on the app – the icon is a bell like those you find on hotel reception desks.
It launched across 260 cities with ten categories – chefs, prepared meals, catering, photography, personal training, massages, spa treatments, hair styling, make-up and nails.
Airbnb Experiences, which first launched in 2016, has been “reimagined from the ground up” to offer people local experiences “hosted” by people who know their cities best. It launched across 650 cities with five categories – history and culture, food and drink, nature and outdoors, art and design, and fitness and wellness.
They are also rolling out Airbnb Originals – one-off events often with a celebrity host.
One of the biggest shifts is that Airbnb wants these new categories to be used by people in their own cities as well as visitors, heralding a move from being a travel app to an experience, or community, platform.
And all of this needs a whole new design system, which is where Connor and her team of 200 designers come in.
A series of design challenges
There was an overarching design challenge – to bring these new elements into the Airbnb ecosystem in a way that felt integrated and exciting, but didn’t overshadow the accommodation offering, on which the company has built an billion business.
But below that, there were a series of “really fun design challenges” to create the spaces and interfaces that would support this new direction.
These included the new homescreen, a new profile page, a new itinerary pageand product description pages, or PDPs, which capture these myriad experiences, from historic tours to wine tasting, and bring them to life in a clear and engaging way.
“Brian really wanted the PDPs to tell a story, so you could go from the top to the bottom and really quickly discern what this thing was about,” Connor explains. “For a really long time we were talking about having video. But you have to sit back and watch a video, and it can be quite passive.”
The solution was a 2×2 grid which quickly communicates the key information, and then a design structure that allows for scanning. Elsewhere, carousels are used to help users browse the broader range of things they can get via the app.
The new Experiences flow in the app
The designs needed to strike a fine a balance – to demonstrate breadth and abundance, without sacrificing ease-of-use.
“We want people to get the information they need and then get back to doing life,” Connor says. “That’s a big thing for us when we’re designing.”
That begins, she explains, with an obsession with simplicity that underpins every design review. “We are constantly asking, do people need this? Do they want it? If no, then take it away.”
But the team also thinks a lot about the platform’s personality, “using craft and care to make the experience feel delightful.”
Chesky talked in his presentation of bringing more depth and vibrancy back to the app, moving away from the flat, and sometimes soulless, big tech experience..
There are lots of nice touches – when you press the hot air balloon icon for Experiences it belches fire, when you hit the Services bell it shakes as if summoning a concierge.
“It’s not about creating pretty things just because we can,” Connor says. “The delightful moments always have a utility behind them.”
So on the itinerary page, the check-in time has an icon showing an open door with the lights on behind; the check-out time is accompanied by a closed door with a darkened space behind it.
How did this happen?
Rewind again, and I sit down with Connor in Airbnb’s London office about six weeks before the new app goes live. You wouldn’t know that they are at the business end of such a huge project; Connor is calm and self-reflective.
I first met her back in the early 2010s, when she ran her own graphic design studio in London. She joined Apple in 2016 as a human interface designer, and moved to Airbnb in 2021.
Was this – working for some of the biggest design-led companies in technology – always the plan?
“Not at all,” she laughs. “It’s surprising and magical to me that this small-time graphic designer from London ended up here. I often ask myself – how did this happen?”
The answer, she says, involves luck and timing. But it also speaks to her willingness to say yes to new opportunities, an approach she adopted after once saying no.
During an internship at a London ad agency, someone offered Connor the chance to design flyers for a local club night. “I got totally freaked out and ghosted the opportunity,” she says. “I’ve always regretted that, not just saying yes and seeing how it went.”
She’d always been interested in creativity, often being taken as a kid to London’s museums where she would happily sketch for hours.
“I loved and admired artists,” she says. “But deep inside I knew I wasn’t one. I was a bit of a girl scout, a bit practical. I liked making things, and solving things, and helping people.”
Connor says her career has been a mix of “going with the flow and wanting to drive the flow.”
She did an art foundation course because someone she worked with doing Saturday shifts in a supermarket was doing one, and she thought it sounded interesting.
The course was “a real awakening” and introduced her to graphic design, which she’d go on to study at the University of Middlesex.
“I did bumble through life a bit, but I am driven to be good at what I’m doing,” she says. “So even though I might fall into something, once I fall into it, I want to do it the best I can.”
She admits to being “bamboozled” when Apple first got in touch. “The email felt like spam,” she laughs, “it was from hello@apple or something.”
The new Guest Profile page
While she had worked on websites before, she wasn’t a digital product designer. And she was happy in London, running her own studio amid the strong creative community that blossomed in the city at that time.
“There were all these small agencies doing really cool work and sharing resources. It was an environment I thrived in, and felt comfortable in. So the idea of leaving all that behind, and going to America where I didn’t know anyone, and I didn’t know how things worked, was very nerve-wracking.”
But the memory of the club night flyers spurred her on. “I didn’t want to be the person who says no and regrets it. So I went, and it was the best thing I ever did.”
Although she hadn’t had much exposure to digital product design, she found that her experience in wayfinding proved very useful. “With wayfinding you are thinking about how to move people though a space, with visuals and graphics, in a way that tells a story. A lot of that thinking is very similar in digital products.”
A defining time
Connor spent five years at Apple and moved to Airbnb in 2021, initially as senior director of design, before becoming a VP the following year.
She saw in Airbnb what appeared to be a very rare opportunity.
“It felt like this was going to be a defining time for the company, and that we would really be able to shape something,” she says.
It was also exciting to work for someone who was a designer before he was a founder.
“I am fortunate to have a leader who understands the value of design,” Connor says.
“For a lot of my peers who work at organisations of this scale, a lot of their job is translation, advocating for design, and trying to get a seat at the table. I never need to advocate for design with Brian – he has made space for the design team to be at the heart of the company.”
But once a designer, always a designer. Does he often give feedback on specific design details?
“Oh 100%,” Connor laughs. “He has this deep knowledge, and this great perspective, because he is looking at the whole company all of the time. But he’s always in the pixels too, asking about the radius of a button or something.”
Overseeing 200 designers can be challenging, but she sees the fundamentals as being similar to leading much smaller teams.
“I don’t think there’s a huge difference between managing five designers or managing 200, when you break it down,” she says. “The ability to build trust, to empower teams, and to be decisive, these all scale up.”
She has built a culture which revolves around courage, and says she is drawn to people who, like her, “have a point of view and speak up for what’s right.”
“I think that goes back to the Girl Guide thing again,” she says.
In a company like Airbnb, where design and business are very intertwined, does she expect her designers to understand the commercial impact of their work?
“I expect them to be curious about it, and want to learn,” Connor says. She tries to encourage this commercial awareness through, for example, inviting other teams in the business to share their insights with the design team, and mandating that project reviews include a discussion of the impact created.
“We want to make it easy for the team to understand why these things are linked, and why they’re important,” Connor explains.
More senior roles are expected to have more of this business acumen, but she doesn’t miss the days when designers often felt like they needed to have an MBA, to speak the right language.
“I want our designers to be designers, first and foremost,” she says.
Day one
Back at the Airbnb launch event, I ask Connor what happens now.
“Well, we’re going to have a really good party,” she says. “But I think we are excited to build on all this work now.
“I actually think today is like day one,” she says. “I think that’s how it feels for the company.”
Design disciplines in this article
Industries in this article
Brands in this article
What to read next
The Guardian unveils redesigned app and homepage
Digital Design
7 May, 2025
Aad creates guide to more sustainable digital design
Digital Design
4 Feb, 2025
How Ragged Edge gamified credit scores for Checkmyfile
Digital Design
26 Nov, 2024
#was #bit #nuts #teo #connor
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