CASE STUDIES Customer Driven Product Design
Disrupting The Hospitality Industry
The hospitality industry invests millions of dollars into technologies that improve the guest experience. Automation and key-less solutions that enhance their hotel guests stays are flooding the industry. SafeStay 365 provides real-time room status 24/7 using cellular technology, IoT and wireless hardware. Room data collected is transformed into a data visualization UI that highlights occupancy status, energy footprint, alerts, etc…
The Challenge & Solution
CHALLENGE
No easy way of monitoring the carbon footprint, staffing efficiencies, housekeeping safety, and guest experience.
Housekeepers must knock on every hotel room door to confirm its occupancy status which is time consuming and unsafe for staff.
Housekeeping crews are blind to which floors have the most unoccupied rooms to turnover which is an inefficient use of time.
Individual room thermostats are not monitored in unoccupied rooms potentially wasting valuable energy and money.
The Discovery Process
Empathy & Definition
Empathy sessions were held with hospitality customers that frequently travel and stay in hotels as well as the hotel staffers that move through multiple rooms everyday.
Business travelers that frequent hotels 1-3 weeks per month
Casual travelers (families) that travel 2-3 times per year.
Hotel managers, regional and executive leadership
Hotel staffers that interact with hotel patrons and room cleanliness daily
Team Make Up
As the head of design Marty integrated a customer experience strategy in the business strategy and consulted & designed the MVP prototype for the startup to achieve its initial round of funding.
Conducted customer interviews and brain storming session with customers and stakeholders
Created blue prints, journey maps and prototypes to test leaps of faith.
Partnered with the leadership and system architects to develop business and technical requirements, strategic road map, and MVP requirements.
Created use cases to inform information architecture and interaction design.
Developed the brand identity and design pattern library that enables modular build at scale.
The Approach
Competitive analysis
Property Management Systems (PMS) analysis
Customer interviews
Personas development
Journey maps
Brainstorming sessions with key stakeholders
Design user flows
Rapid prototyping to confirm hypotheses
Design system supporting modular design that scales
Ideation
SOLUTION
Cost Savings: SafeStay 365 will inform hotel management when rooms are occupied or vacant via a 24/7 monitoring system. This can be used to optimize housekeeping, assist maintenance, check-in availability, analytics for operations and most of all provide an additional layer of security to hotel guests that’s ubiquitous and non-invasive. It will also provide hotel guests with their room status in real-time, when it was serviced and the name of the housekeeper, and room temperature.
Safety: Additionally, first responders have immediate access to view which rooms are occupied in real-time during an emergency. This will save lives.
Design and Prototypes
Hotel Staff Mobile User Flows
Hotel Staff Web App User Flows
Hotel Guest Mobile User Flows
Prototype Manager/Staff Dashboard (Mobile View)
Provides real-time data of hotel property’s room occupancy status and all rooms temperature average. This increases housekeeping efficiencies reducing operation costs and managing room temperatures reduces the hotel carbon footprint.
Prototype Manager/Staff Dashboard (Web app)
The floor view provides room details including occupancy status and room temperature. Housekeeping can react quickly to alerts; unoccupied rooms with thermostats set too high or too low.
In Market
A Powerful Unified System
Real Time Monitoring • Geo Locations
Brainstorming Through Sketching
Most effective ideation tool is sketching and sketching as much as possible to get as many ideas in front of co-creators. Thinking through known customer pains the collection of sketches provided the initial use cases to take through the design process
The Results
The prototype enabled a proof-of-concept install at a single hotel of a global hotel management group, which after 30 days of in use data collection the company signed for additional hotels.
The SafeStay product has evolved into multiple products used across the hospitality and food service industries.
The company received a round of seed money and is actively pursuing VC.