• 原文地址：How Snow White helped Airbnb prove that storytelling is the most important skill in design
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The company’s biggest breakthrough innovation began with the written word.

Photo by Alexis Marcou

Want to know the secret to Airbnb’s success and world-class user experience? You might want to turn to the Disney movie Snow White.

But before I explain why, let me introduce you to Tom Wolfe.

“Not seeing is believing, but believing is seeing.”

Tom Wolfe is known for revolutionizing journalism in the 1960s by using more colorful storylines in his fiction and applying them to his non-fiction reporting.

In The opening page of one of his books, “The Painted Word,” Wolfe describes his sudden, startling Epiphany about The radical movement in contemporary art — specifically about The rise of abstract painting as you see and think, “Well, I can understand it already.”

Wolfe’s Epiphany was triggered by the New York Times’ criticism of realistic art. In short, the critic wrote, it is hard to appreciate a painting without a theory to support it.

Wolfe vividly recalls reading the article and feeling uneasy and then having an earnest “aha moment,” which was his first understanding of contemporary art.

“I, like many others, have stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God knows how many [paintings] over the years… In short, over the years I’ve believed that in art, if there’s no other way, what you see is what you believe. Ah – how shortsighted! Now finally, on April 28, 1974, I knew that my understanding had always been backward. “Not to believe what you see, you idiot, but to believe what you see, because modern art has become entirely literary: paintings and other works exist only to illustrate words.”

Well, like a painting, experience design begins with words; Text for asking and answering questions. How do you want others to feel? What kind of message do you want to send? What kind of behavior do you want to encourage?

As Wolfe describes it, great experiential design is purely literary — the narrative of the outcome (achieved through the design of a product or service).

How is Airbnb using storytelling (and hiring Pixar animators) to design cutting-edge experiences

Everyone in the company contributes to experience design by telling stories. The story throughout the experience design process captures the essence and desired outcome of each moment for the client, rather than limiting the design process to a specific solution: what the client did, thought and felt at each step.

Like Wolfe, Airbnb used the power of storytelling to create a customer experience breakthrough in its early days.

When Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky read Walt Disney’s biography, he discovered that Disney and his animators had invented a technique to create Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This technique, called storyboarding, creates comic book-like storylines that all film collaborators can understand the visual form of a film’s narrative.

It was a lightbulb moment for Chesky, who immediately decided to use storyboards to design future Airbnb user experiences.

As Fast Company reports, the project was codenamed “Snow White” and began with a series of emotional moments that made up the end-to-end Airbnb experience and quickly evolved into story-sharing around the Company.

Interestingly, to improve the fidelity of stories as a communication tool, Airbnb hired animators from Disney Pixar to demonstrate storyboards for customer experiences.

The video shows how the storytelling process became the company roadmap in its early days:

  • YouTube video link: youtu.be/nT7Irq8YuSo

To inform the story-driven design process, Airbnb wants to tell the story of the perfect trip. In a podcast interview, Chesky described an experiment in which he offered a customer the travel experience of a lifetime: Airbnb spends tens of thousands of dollars to give a person the best possible travel experience.

An exciting user experience breaks down into storyboards that eventually expand into the Airbnb ride we know today.

Every designer is a storyteller

Every business breakthrough starts with a story, starting with a customer’s pain point or, in Airbnb’s case, a story about a particularly good experience they had.

Most designers or entrepreneurs struggle with product innovation through wireframes or product sketches. But why not start with words? Whether it’s a movie-like document written in Microsoft Word or a comic strip drawn on paper.

Of course, story doesn’t always precede form. Story and design go hand in hand — design work can also help tell a story. But starting with a story makes the design process easier to digest and share.

As Wolfe once taught us, we start with words because everything we do is to tell the story (to be realistic); Whether it’s animated Disney movies or innovative products or services.

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