Transforming a product suite at Guestline

My Role

Staff Product Designer
Researcher
Product Strategist
Project Lead

Context

Guestline, is a company with over 25 years of experience, and a leader in the UK's Hospitality Tech sector, offering a range of software services including Property Management System (PMS), POS, Payments, and Bookings Manager (Staff and Guest facing).
To expand into the DACH market it needed to show a cohesive platform and streamline operational processes for hoteliers, easing the way users interact with the system.

A modernized UI was key for penetrating into these new markets, but given the product complexity and the lack of research, some foundational work was nedeed.

01Understanding the Challenge

Valuing Collective Wisdom

Stakeholder Interviews & Documentation Review

I was invited to more than 20 onboarding meetings, in which I used the opportunity to interview people from different teams (Sales, CS, PM, Dev, Ops, Mgmt... ), and understand their expectations, perception of what works and doesn't, and what users, customers and prospects think of Guestline.

Learnings

Although design was key to the company vision the understanding of it was fuzzy. The team was eager and hungry for it, but skeptical about it how it will work.
Teams and products/features were siloed, and so their learnings.
Research was conducted using mostly the same set of satisfied users/customers, and with a low level of documentation, but anyhow showign a trend towards the lack of expertise for new staff at hotels.
As most of them had hospitality background, they deeply cared about the users and costumers.

Research beyond promoters (External)

With the support of the Sales, Customer Support, and Product team, we crafted a list of customers, users, and prospects with different profiles, but fitting into the company target market.
My goal in here was to established a to understand what were the key issues, motivators, triggers and blockers for the users, customers and prospects, in order to create consesus about the severity of issues, and create a common knowledge about it.

Hotel managers were overloaded due to a lack of staff, and how hard was for new employees to operate the system.

Learnings

New users found the UI extremely hard to navigate and couldn't start delivering value with it before having an 2 weeks onsite training.
The platform feature depth was perceived as superior as other competitors
Many customers felt unheard, as usability improvements on core features weren't tackle (search, dashboard, mobile…)
Many prospects had a negative first impression of Guestline, due to its outdated UI and perceived difficulty of use.
Some competitors were perceived as easy to use, but not as powerful.
Understaffed hotels, struggling to cover vacancies and train new staff (time and cost as important factors)

Data analysis

After collecting the learnings from the interviews it was time to put together some numbers that helped us seeing how users interacted with the system.
For this some funnel analysis, feature usage baselines, were analysed in order to understand the different pathways.

Navigation seem to be the root cuase for issues related to learning experience, feature discovery, perceived complexity. With a main navigation hidden behind icons, a messy structure, and a search not using natural language (names, companies...)

Learnings

10 of the features/pages had 90% of the PMS interactions
87% of the interactions with the navigation was by using the hotkeys (customer setted topbar), which kept many functionalities hidden and unused.
There were multiple ways for achieving the same result, each one of those with a similar function but unique in their own way (e.g. 8 different search tools for reservations, with unmatching fields, information and results)
No linearity, the process was complex and messy, without common paths for users to achieve their tasks.

Competitive analysis

Some of the newer competitors were using their leaner feature set to promote quicker changes, but they often fell into the common pitfall of repeating one another. Although they looked more modern than Guestline, weren’t modern enough to meet other industries standards.
Besides the regular competitor analysis, using referents from similar industries or use cases helped creating a clearer understanding of what we could achieve.

Presenting new role models and inspiration about where to go was extremely important in order to set higher quality standards, as competitors were still in a very early stage of design adoption.

Learnings

Overloaded hotel managers were looking for more flexible ways of interacting with the system.
Automation and removal of mundane task as an industry need and trend, following the airlines case. (Self Check-In and Out, Online upgrades and payments…)
Intuitive, easy to use software was needed as the expertise and hospitality experience of new staff declined
Lack of visual differentiation between competitors

After decades of using Guestline, some of the users were very defensive of the status quo, but change wasnt in question, so it needed to happen with care.

02Setting the strategy

Where to go and how to get there?

During the initial research phase, it was found that in order to win prospects, we needed to transform the product into an easy-to-use platform, while improving internal operations reflecting team unit into the product.

I presented an early startegy in each we could start building up the foundations for the Geustline's vision, but still having the space to steer at any given point.

I conducted multiple workshops, presentations, surveys and analysis, in order to bring some alignment, and capture needs, concerns and ideas, and create a common knowledge about the competitive landscape, the product and its vision.

Searching for full-automation seemed like a far dream, but there areas that needed to be connected, and simplify.

Ultimately we needed to find a place to start, were a solution could live within legacy code and UI, but bringing benefit to users ASAP.

Usage vs UX Benefit, was an important way to measure the most relevant pain-points for users and costumers, but more analysis considering possible impact to sales and to the system foundations were considered in order to choose where to start.

03Design foundations