I was in charge of automating business critical flows within the Airbnb app across several iOS devices in portrait and landscape views for each device. We automated the capturing of screenshots for the business critical flows across 26 different languages and ensured that this was conducted across the weekly builds that were released internally and then uploaded them to an internal website for the design organization and CX departments to leverage.

The goal of the project was to answer one simple, yet mighty question. "What's actually in the Airbnb mobile product, right now?"

Scripts are written in plain language which describe the series of steps through a particular flow (e.g. "payments" flow).

When the scripts are run, they generate images and metadata.

This information is uploaded and stored in the Airshots back-end and exposed through an API.

A web application talks to the API and exposes the information in a useful format for the Airfam.

The majority of design teams were able to see how flows had evolved over time using air/shots across different devices and languages which helped further inform their design decisions in the future as well as understand how primarily designing interfaces in English could drastically change in a more character dense language like Korean or with a wordier language, such as German.

This tool was especially helpful for the CX teams as it allowed them to navigate user's through transactions whenever they had issues on a certain flow. For example, a customer whose native language is Korean and is visiting Germany while on vacation trying to book a place to stay is having issues with characters translating on the app could reach out to CX and help them complete the transaction.

According to folks in leadership, this tool was deemed as business critical and was a unique opportunity to view the product with a "God's eye view" of the product across all languages and orientations of the device. As for exact metrics, I don't have that data accessible to myself to showcase in my portfolio anymore, but what I can say is that there were thousands of active viewers leveraging the tool internally within Airbnb.

As this was my first job in the industry, and being transferred from the production design team over to the design tools team at Airbnb was an inspiring moment in my career as I was working around some of the most forward thinking people in design developing design tools. Being a designer at heart, working on air/shots gave me a unique opportunity to not only contribute to the power of design tools, but it opened my eyes to understanding the value of design tools and automation for both design departments and even entire companies to leverage design tools as their "secret sauce". The growth that has come from this experience for me is still happening to this day as it has inspired me to one day become a Design Technologist capable of building my own design tools to help design orgs grow efficiently. Huge shoutout to Luke Carter, Lucas Smith, Gavin Owens, David Chen, Devin Abbott, and Jem Gold for mentoring me throughout my time at Airbnb!