@John232
The excerpts below are from an Airbnb blog post, about the important initiatives the company had embarked on to design and build products that would best foster trust, openness and a sense of security between hosts and guests. It was written exactly 3 years ago this week, and profile pics were featured highly. Airbnb is certainly singing a very different tune these days.
"Designing for trust is a well understood topic across the hospitality industry, but Airbnb's effort to democratize hospitality mean we have to rely on trust in an even more dramatic way. Not long ago our friends and families thought we were crazy for believing that someone would let a complete stranger stay in their home. That feeling stemmed from the fact that most of us were raised to fear strangers.
“Stranger danger” is a natural human defense mechanism; overcoming it requires a leap of faith for both guests and hosts. But that’s a leap we can actively support by understanding what trust is, how it works, and how to build products that support it.
We began with the assumption that people are fundamentally good and, with the right tools in place, we could help overcome the stranger-danger bias. To do so, we needed to remove anonymity, giving guests and hosts an identity in our community. We built profile pages where they could upload pictures of themselves, write a description about who they are, link social media accounts, and highlight feedback from past trips. Over time we’ve emphasized these identity pages more and more. Profile pictures, for example, are now mandatory — because they are heavily relied upon. In nearly 50% of trips, guests visit a host’s profile at least once, and 68% of the visits occur in the planning phase that comes before booking. When people are new to Airbnb these profiles are especially useful: compared to experienced guests, first time guests are 20% more likely to visit a host’s profile before booking"
https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/building-for-trust-503e9872bbbb