Introducing Codebell

Overview

Codebell is a QR code based scan to call solution currently functioning as an upgrade to traditional home communication system like Doorbells and intercoms.

One of the cofounder’s of the startup Sudhanshu reached out to me for designing a new addition in their product vertical for the hospitality industry.

Timeline

July 2023 - Aug 2023

Status of the project

Codebell is currently in the Third month of its beta phase and its third testing cycle with hotel managers and still a work in progress

My role and the team

I played a role of a product designer and was solely responsible for User research, Visual design , Prototyping and Usability testing. ( Image myself with a spark to make my team’s vision to life 😂 )

The Problem

Traditional communication in Indian hotels hampers efficiency, causing guest dissatisfaction, revenue loss, and managerial challenges to hotel

Throughout their stay, hotel guests have numerous requests. In many Indian hotels, traditional communication methods like word of mouth and pen and paper are still prevalent among staff, with telephonic communication used for guest interactions.

These methods often leads to communication gaps, inefficiencies, and errors, causing customer dissatisfaction and overall loss of revenue and reputation.

Hotel managers struggle to track and gain visibility into guest requests, missing opportunities for improvement and gather guest feedback across different services.

The Solution

1. Scan QR code

To start using hotel services guests can simply point at the QR code which lead them to the landing page

2. User requests for Extra toiletries in this case !

Items and services are categorized into larger groups for efficient checkout !

3. Request received by Hotel Management

Receptionists can view requests or complaints progressively, prioritized by importance and recency, avoiding overwhelm

4. Managing all hotel operations in one dashboard

Dashboard view helps hotel staff, managers to quickly see everything under the sun when it comes to hotel guest communication

5. Automate assignment based on staff workload

All tasks will be automatically assigned to staff that are on duty. Assignment will be determined by staff’s availability and smart clustering of similar tasks

6. Hotel staff experience

A contactless way to receive tasks. No more passing of papers thought several people, all on the go wherever you are.

7. Guests are prompted to add feedback for tracking areas of improvement !

The feedback helps managers to take data driven decisions and personalize services to the guest improving overall customer satisfaction and revenue

8. Make data driven decisions

Track fulfilment, task distribution and many more.. and optimize resources, predict workload and reduce guest requests by leveraging historic data provided by the system

Other user flows…

Research phase

Essence of Stakeholder interview: Crafting a User-Centric Solution to Elevate Communication in Mid-Sized Delhi Hotels and Enhance Guest Satisfaction

Before starting to design right after my phone call with client , I decided to have a stakeholder interview session of almost an hour to understand the goals that the business wants to achieve through the design process

Here is a summary of goals of the project :

To design and validate a user centric solution that significantly improves communication efficiency within the hotel guests and staff, focusing on mid sized hotels in Delhi, India.

To improve guest satisfaction by addressing specific pain points in communication related services like room service, housekeeping, laundry etc

Alleviate operational challenges faced by different user groups, including front desk receptionists, room service attendants, housekeeping staff, and more.

Screenshots of our initial stakeholder interview 👇

Determining the target hotels : Midsize, Multiple amenities, Delhi….

Upon stakeholder interaction we decided to target Mid size to 2 star hotels with multiple amenities, definitely not OYO homes which has 2 start to 3 star reviews

We primarily targeted hotels that are seeking for a digital solution that’s simple, affordable and help improve guest satisfaction, overall productivity of staff

We chose hotels in the City of Delhi as the startup’s base location was in Delhi and the stakeholders already had access to hotels in and around the locality.

Setting research objectives

Identify how mid size hotels with multiple amenities operate currently, identify their current methods to address requests and find inefficiencies in their standard operating procedures

Examine the pain points of the user groups like guests, hotel manager, receptionist and identify the underlying reasons for them.

Understand the market for Guest communication software, What are the competitors features, their strengths and weaknesses to take further design decisions

Who are the users ?

Broadly there are 3 user groups

Guests : Hotels guests from multiple age groups who are tech literate and have experience of using QR code based apps like GPay, Phonepe etc.

Hotel managers : Who take decisions on Menu’s, Inventory, Stock management , guide staff and solve escalated problems of guests

Hotel staff : This group has multiple staffs like Front desk attendant , Room service attendant, Laundry staff, Spa services manager etc.

Secondary research

Analyzing Guest reviews of target hotels to understand their pain points

To start with I decided to target specific hotels that fit my target criteria and go through a bunch of reviews from websites like Trip advisor, Google reviews etc to find patterns in pain-points the guest were facing during the course of their stay

Market research

Discovering Gaps: Unveiling a Void in Hotel Management Software Focused on Guest Communication and Efficiency, Paving the Way for Codebell's Unique Opportunity.

On research I understood that currently hotels operate get their bookings through wide range of inputs like online travel agents, booking apps like Make my trip, Kayak, Booking.com etc , these bookings along with the backend office management, revenue system together with basic staff management features account for the PMS - Property management system

There are so many PMS that help in organizing customer data but there were very limited software that specifically target in Guest communication and efficiency of hotel staff

This proves to be an opportunity for codebell, also with integrations allowing it to be a useful tool along with PMS

Analyzing the competitors to benchmark features, understand market gap and gather UX insights from UI patterns

Most Indian software were hard to get a trial to run through different features they have implemented. I got insights from few apps from India and abroad to find out their strengths and , pricing model and much more..

Primary research

Upon interviewing 10 users : Interviewees unanimously pinpointed communication inefficiencies as a primary frustration, highlighting a 3X improvement in hotels with digital communication methods over those using traditional practices.

Since the hotels were based out of Delhi, my stakeholders took charge of having interactions with hotel staff from desired target hotels.

We then had our second round out stakeholder interaction to understand the operations of hotel and identify pain points of individual staffs like front desk receptionist, Laundry staff, Room service attendants and Spa managers etc

In the same session we had involved in affinity mapping the user insights I had from the user interviews to collectively form themes and patterns

Defining the problem through journey mapping

Journey mapping helped in finally relating the current SOP’s followed by target hotels with problems faced by individual persona’s like Guests, Room service attendant. Receptionist etc

Ideation phase

After identifying the problem I collaborated with stakeholders to work on “ How might we solve this ? “ exercise were I motivated them to brainstorm and ideate HMW questions and solutions. I then stared sketching wireframes using crazy 8 method to think through at a limited time frame and we finally landed with 10 core wireframe sketches to define a features list

Here are some of HMW’s we went through !

We used MoSCoW method to prioritize features from the sketches I made and made a list of must have, should have, could have and won’t have features for reference

Design and prototyping phase

How I designed user flows ?

After determining the primary features I Indulged in creating a sitemap to understand a broad picture of the flows of information guest and hotel staff had to take, I also got to learn about “ Service blueprints “ and implemented them as a them for my sitemap.

I decided to map out interaction and flow of information across different devices and personas for each service. For eg. For In-room dining, I plotted how the entire process happened from start to the end ! and asked myself “ What are the users goals here ? “ ,”What are they thinking, feeling, acting etc “ to derive at user flows

Checkout the miro file for understanding how I derived at user flows

Design explorations and testing

Since I did not have direct access to hotel staff and it would take more time to test with users on an 1 : 1, I decide to go with remote un- moderated task based usability testing through a product called Maze.

We distributed the individual task forms to 25 participants spanning across the user groups like Guests, hotel receptionist, managers, room service attendants, spa managers etc.

The product allowed as to not only test but collect qualitative feedback from participants which helped in planning further iterations. We finalized on the most positive responding prototype that participants found to work with ease, the survey also allowed us to obtain qualitative data about user's thoughts while using the app.

Here are a few highlights from the results:

3 Major improvements in my design

Impact of my designs

We gathered a mostly positive response to the prototype. Participants were able to perform the benchmark tasks with ease, and the survey allowed us to obtain qualitative data about user's thoughts while using the app. Here are a few highlights from the results:

Design system and Figma explorations

Since I worked on a very early stage startup product, I took an approach of iterations over settling for a design system. I stuck to creating components and follow atomic design principles in this project. I preferred to go for a design system after achieving product market fit.

While designing for the product, I was aware of figma config updates and wanted to take use of the opportunity to play with variable properties . The adding to cart feature was pretty repetitive pattern which I observed in the user flows for ordering food items / toiletries / towels etc. So I decided to try out variables in add to cart feature .

Here is a snippet of how it works :

Constraints, Reflection and learnings

This was my first real project that I worked with stakeholders involved, It was a great learning experience working with a team and influencing them to participate in design decisions and learning about business and sales along the way from them. Being able to work on actual product made the entire experience more realistic than traditional “ No- Constraints” Bootcamps.

Initially it was scary to take up a project involving diverse user groups and dimensions as I was an intern who transitioned to UX design. One thing that mostly helped was making variations in design and showcasing multiple variations to users and stakeholders to gain validation instead of just thinking through my own virtues of the project.

Since there weren’t any developer onboarded at the phase of ideation. I took personal help from developer friends in my circle to get to know if my designs were feasible for development. One other constraint that was tough for me was that I wasn’t directly involved in interaction with hotels as there was language barrier issues with few hotel managers the cofounder had known. So I stuck with unmoderated user testing insights to design the hotel dashboard

Next steps

If we had more time, we would have loved to conduct in-depth ride along usability studies with various hotel managers of different metro cities and tested the prototype in the field/real world scenario. This would have helped us identify some of the feasibility factors and scenarios like a case of overbooking of hotel rooms which would have helped in, usability of the interface in terms of accessibility, information architecture, and our solution's impact on helping improve guest satisfaction and staff efficiency.

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