Airbnb didn't come to be worth some $10 billion just by making it dead easy to share a stranger's house. The company got to 11 digits because it does that job elegantly—as you'd expect from a service built by two designers and an engineer. But to keep growing, Airbnb has to become even more appealing. To that end, the founders recently unveiled a dramatic redesign of their app, site, and even their logo—which reminded some wags of a certain female body part. Katie Dill, the company's head of experience design, is ready to explain all those changes. —Cliff Kuang

The photos on the site used to be of amazing apartments. Now they're homey vignettes: people shopping, playing guitar. Why the shift?

That experience—of being home wherever you are—is unique to Airbnb. So the product has to be about experiences, not just properties. When you think about taking a trip, you might think about the trees you saw or the sounds of a café or the vines in the wind at a winery. We want to evoke that with imagery.

How do details like that tie to Airbnb's broader goals?

When a guest and host interact with each other through the app, they have to feel like they are part of the same thing. Design consistency gives you that peace of mind and the sense that this is a stable place to build a relationship. Whenever an app is buggy, the grid doesn't line up, or the type treatment is off, you start to question a company and wonder where else they're slipping. What about my money? Are they going to protect me? You can fix that by caring about the details.

So what new products lie in Airbnb's future?

One day Airbnb will be able to have an impact on all aspects of a trip—we want to help you find interesting things to see and better ways to remember them. To do that, we have to think about every step of the experience. But as I've found in my career, few organizations make that effort, because teams are siloed. Users can sense that disconnect. Our aim is to create flow from one point to the next. For example, we've found that every trip has hero moments—the best parts of the journey, whether it's a meal you had or a street you walked. We want to use those moments to help you craft a story. So we now have a place on the site, create.Airbnb.com, where travelers can log their memories and share them. We'll see if that makes sense to incorporate as a core part of the listings.

But eventually users go offline and talk face-to-face. How does Airbnb foster positive interactions?

With the right cues—for both the host and the guest. I can't talk about everything we're working on, but part of it is host training. We've revamped reviews to offer more relevant pieces of information to hosts, such as private feedback about their guest's stay. We also do simultaneous reviews—you can't see your reviews unless you give one yourself. That's a powerful tool that reinforces the community's values. And we're looking at ways we can better inform users—for example, with search results in our app geared to your location.

What did you think when people said the new logo looked kind of … personal?

My favorite response on Twitter was something like “If you see that in the mirror, you should see a doctor.” This is a symbol that communicates several things—belonging, a sense of place—and it's simple enough to draw in the sand with your toe. That's amazing! People have fun writing about the negative things, but the positives are what will make it live on.