Airbnb founder taps Peter Arnell as the first US product designer

Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia is expanding his team at the US National Design Studio, a Trump initiative focused on improving the government’s online presence. On Monday, Gebbia announced that American designer Peter Arnell had joined the team to become the brand’s first US designer.

Gebbia shared the news of Arnell’s hiring during the Wall Street Journal’s “The Future of Everything” conference on Monday. Arnell will join a team of Silicon Valley design and software engineering talent, focused on redesigning the usability of US government platforms.

In his ten-year career as a marketer and marketer, Arnell has worked with major brands such as Donna Karan New York, Samsung, Unilever, Pepsi, Reebok, Chrysler, The Home Depot, and more. Now, he will focus on recreating this digital piece of the United States of America, which he calls “the greatest product in the world.”

“This is a unique and different idea from the word ‘product’ in the sense that we are not re-creating this world,” Arnell explained at the WSJ event. “What we are trying to do is, mainly, to have a consensus, [a] a unified look and feel, to begin building trust in the way the American citizen interacts with government every day. “

He said the move would bring an “exciting challenge” ahead, as the team was tasked with redesigning 27,000 government websites. To do so, the team relied on many of the same design ideas they had used to build high-end consumer apps, such as Airbnb.

There’s an Airbnb spirit here,” Gebbia noted, saying that just like bringing the complicated process of finding a place to rent or a vacation rental online, government work is also about taking a complicated process and making it simple, safe, and trustworthy.

He also mentioned some of the tasks that the team has already completed to improve the design and functionality of the government’s online programs and websites so far. For example, the team updated the government’s retirement process, which was complicated and paper-based, into a streamlined web-based version that employees can complete in minutes, in some cases, instead of months. Another proposed plan has reduced the government’s workload from 87 to 12, and the plan is to bring it down to 10, he said.

The design initiative will also work to address other frustrations of using government websites, such as loss of navigation sites or page timeouts, which cause users to lose their data.

Gebbia slyly called the poor consumer experience of using government sites “one of the darkest UX patterns imaginable” – a reference to deceptive design or user interface tricks that sites use to trick their users.

“Just the idea of [a government website] being tough prevents you from even engaging in it,” he suggested. “I think we’re going beyond…this is over. People must feel empowered to do what the government should do,” he said.