Airbnb co-founder taps Peter Arnell as first US chief brand architect

Airbnb billionaire co-founder Joe Gebbia is growing his team at the U.S. National Design Studio, the Trump initiative focused on improving the government’s online presence. On Monday, Gebbia announced that American designer Peter Arnell joined the team to become the first U.S. chief brand architect.

Gebbia shared the news of Arnell’s hire during the The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference on Monday. Arnell will be joining a group of people that includes Silicon Valley design and software engineering talent, who are singularly focused on reshaping the usability of the U.S. government’s online platforms.

In his four-decade career as a brander and marketer, Arnell has worked with major brands like Donna Karan New York, Samsung, Unilever, Pepsi, Reebok, Chrysler, The Home Depot, and others. Now, his focus will be to rebrand this digital slice of the United States of America, which he calls “the greatest brand in the world.”

“This is a very special and different perspective on the word ‘brand’ in the sense that we’re not rebranding this country, of course,” Arnell explained at the WSJ event. “What we’re trying to do is, very specifically, have a consistency, [a] unified look-and-feel and experience, so that we start to build trust in the way that the American citizen daily interacts with the government.”

He said the move presents an “interesting challenge” ahead, as the team is tasked with redesigning 27,000 government websites. To do so, the team relies on many of the same design sensibilities that they previously used to build best-in-class consumer apps, like Airbnb.

There’s a spirit of Airbnb here,” Gebbia pointed out, saying that much like bringing the complicated process of finding a room to rent or an online vacation rental, the government work is also about taking a complex process and making it easier, safer, and trustworthy.

He also mentioned some of the work the team has already completed to improve the design and the functionality of the government’s online operations and websites so far. For instance, the team revamped the government’s retirement process, which had been complex and paper-based, to a streamlined web-based version that employees can complete within minutes, in some cases, instead of months. Another process being prototyped has brought a common government workflow down from 87 clicks to 12, and the plan is to get it to 10, he said.

The design initiative will also work to address other frustrations of using government websites, like getting lost navigating sites or pages timing out, causing users to lose their data.

Gebbia slyly referred to the poor consumer experience of using government sites as “one of the darkest UX patterns that you could think of” — a reference to the deceptive design or user interface tricks sites use to manipulate their users.

“Just the perception of [a government website] being hard precludes you from even engaging in it,” he suggested. “I think we’re moving beyond this…this is over. People should feel empowered to get the thing done with the government that they need to get done,” he said.