My Role
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.
01Understanding the Challenge
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
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
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
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
02Setting the strategy
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.
Searching for full-automation seemed like a far dream, but there areas that needed to be connected, and simplify.
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
04Results
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