Work in progress
We have developed a new digital service for hotels and hotels guests' needs. With our digital guest folder, hotels can streamline your workflow, save time and provide better service to your guests - before, during and after their stay.
Well not all product follow the school textbook theory. We were in a rush with that project. It was this kind of "special job" you get from clients who like to work with you because you are a quick thinker, reliable and you are always pushing good things forward. Yes I do and I thought it was a really good idea which one of our clients had :-) So I put my 5S Model (Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton, Surface) aside and did a quick research, a small strategic part, started a wireframe by sketching and created hand in hanc with my colleague the "final" surface. We decided to take the first project live with basic function and a rudimentary design. But with a big plan in mind....
The UCD canvas is used to take a look on the user side AND the business side of a product.
You set a business statement, possible users, problems & solutions, motives, fears & alternatives, values and competitor advantages.
For the digital guest folder we have two users – the hotelier who needs to buy the product and the user itself (guests) who will interact with the product. Both sides needs to be evaluated.
All these 9 part of the UCD give you an overview what your product is about. You need to take a deeper look to all sections and create further steps. Next steps are to create user personas and do an user reseach. The results should confirm our suspicions in the UCD. If not we need to rethink it.
After we received feedback we have started improving our first version of the digital guest folder regarding UX and UI.
At same points the users needed to "think about" it. That's not good. The user should flow through your product without any ambiguities.
Work in progress
After receiving the users feedback we focussed on improving the usablity.
Developing new feautures and new functions will be done in the second step and after we have more insights about the users need.
tablet / desktop version will follow
As far as we received feedback from our questionaire we have more insights in the digitalization status of our hotels and their needs & wishes. We also need to set next developing steps in our roadmap after getting feedback what functions and features they would prioritize. We also think about entering into a partnership with a other provider to use their interfaces with different hotel systems (Property Management Systems (PMS) or Customer Relationship Systems (CRM)). This would be a big advantage for us to use this existing interfaces compared to develop/connect all this interfaces (like APIs) on our own.
At the moment two more hotels are waiting for their digital guest folder and are willing to do user tests with us. We start with the set up when we have finished the prototype and also have implemented the feedback from the user test of the version 2.0.
