UX Case Study: Concept Luxury Hotel App
For the third project of the General Assembly UX Design Immersive course I worked in a group on a concept app design for a 5 star hotel.
The Curtain Hotel Experiences App
I worked with my classmates from UXDI26 at General Assembly Luna Felo and Alicia Andres on this project.
The Curtain Hotel
We were given a hypothetical brief to make a website or app for The Curtain Hotel. The Curtain Hotel is at the centre of London’s most creative district, Shoreditch. The Curtain offers guests and its own members club a hotel, restaurant, bar and live music venue. The Curtain prides itself on the diversity of its members; artists and professionals coming from a variety of creative industries.
Opportunity
Our brief for this project was to create an app that would allow guests at the hotel to plan and book local experiences based on their interests. The main features that were important from the brief were:
- The ability to plan and book local experiences
- Reschedule booking
- Messaging and chat functionality
- The ability to rate and share experiences
Research Phase
Contextual Inquiry
First of all, we conducted a site visit to The Curtain Hotel to get a better understand of our target audience and the atmosphere guests would be residing in. From spending time at The Curtain, we found that the guests in the hotel are largely working professionals who are mixing business and pleasure.
The guests are looking for the best of the best while they are in London but are also here for business purposes and looking to make the most of their free time. The hotel itself provides a number of indoor entertainment services so there were not many recommendations or information in the hotel about experiences in London.
Competitive Analysis
We conducted a competitive analysis of direct and indirect competitors such as Airbnb experiences, SideStory, Eventbrite and Soho House. Our main findings from the competitive analysis were that the majority of websites did not give users the opportunity to request further information about the experiences in advance if they had any questions.
We were surprised to find that on a lot of the sites users were not able to read reviews of the experiences which was a feature that we had considered essential to the user’s journey and decision making process.
Users were able to browse experiences based on interest categories such as art, history, culture and nature.
User Interviews
Whilst conducting our user interviews we spoke to both business and leisure travellers to get an idea of their habits and behaviours.
“I always have a vague plan of what I want to do but I never book anything. I like it to feel more spontaneous.”
We spoke to ten different people regarding their travel plans. We began to see some patterns about what was important to them when finding local experiences in a new city.
“It’s a trust thing. It’s hard to find somewhere when you don’t know anyone locally.”
Interview Findings
We made an affinity map of our quotes, main points and habits from the interviews. Our insights from this research were that business travellers frequently book extra days off after their trip in order to have time for cultural experiences.
Travellers want to experience local cuisine but find it hard to find trustworthy reviews without asking someone who is local. Also, that travellers prefer to research experiences but not book anything, unless it is a high-end event in which case they prefer to book in advance.
Define Phase
Problem Statement
Luxury travellers need a way to have memorable experiences from a verified, trusted source because they do not want to spend a lot of time planning to then be disappointed.
How Might We
How might we offer unique and luxurious suggestions on where to visit from locals?
How might we make it easier for users to find luxury experiences?
Hypothesis
We believe that by offering memorable experiences from a verified, trusted source to luxury travellers, we will achieve successful travel experiences that requires little time to plan.
Persona
From our research we created our persona, Ella.
Ella travels often for business but likes to spend time in the location after to make sure she doesn’t leave feeling as though she’s missed out. She researches in advance and asks friends about where to go but leaves it until the day to decide so she is free to do things spontaneously. She doesn’t like feeling as though she’s just ticking a list of tourist hotspots. She prefers to find hidden places that feel more local but are still high quality.
User Journey Map
To better understand Ella’s current approach to solving this problem we made a user journey map of how she may go about booking a local experience and how she feels at each stage of the process. From this we understood how much Ella’s own expectations can affect her emotional reaction to each stage and how this is increased potentially if she has been waiting to visit a destination and planning for an extended period of time. We also learnt how dependent on the information Ella receives such as a high number of positive reviews online she may have higher expectations on the day which opens up to greater disappointment if her expectations are not met.
Develop Phase
Ideation
As a group, we carried out a number of timed sketching sessions to think of creative solutions to our problem. We started with the most creative and then worked on the ideas to find out what would be feasible for us to produce as well as what would best help our persona Ella achieve her goal. We combined a number of ideas in the end to form our final solution.
Feature prioritisation
It was important for us as a team to decide what the highest priority features were from those we had created so we made a feature prioritisation matrix. This composed of two axis: one showing what is essential for the user as opposed to just nice to have. The other showing what would be the most time consuming and difficult to produce. We focussed on the solutions that were going to be feasible for our team whilst also having the highest impact on the user’s ability to achieve their goal of finding and booking authentic experiences.
The ideas we prioritised were:
- To have direct contact with the front desk to provide the quality customer service wherever they are expected at The Curtain
- To have curated and personalised content so users can trust the recommendations
- To have recommendations categorised by interest so they can find intuitively what suits them
User Flow
We used the user flow to help us structure what screens we needed to sketch for our first prototype. Ella’s goal on her business trip is to find authentic and memorable experiences for her stay with reliable recommendations.
Paper Prototypes
As one of the most important aspects of the process for our users was to have trustworthy recommendations, we decided to maximise The Curtain Hotel’s members club as a source of exciting quality experiences happening in London.
We wanted to ensure that this was not a time consuming process because our persona Ella does not have enough time to invest in researching what to do when she needs to focus on her business trip. As a result we restricted the number of recommendations to a curated list of 10 that changes weekly. We used our user flow to create the first round of paper prototypes then tested it.
From the testing we learnt that the selection of the restaurants was confusing as users did not have sufficient information to understand why there were only 10 recommendations.
Our chat function with the concierge was also confusing for users as they did not know who they were speaking to and assumed it was an automated chatbot.
We also restructured our navigation as we found during the testing that users were not sure where they were within the site and found it difficult to locate other features.
Digital Prototypes
We used these insights to create a second round of prototypes in a low fidelity digital format. We then tested further to see what additional feedback we would have.
Whilst compiling the findings of this round of testing we understood that users still felt as though they lacked sufficient information on how the restaurants were selected and found the wording of the ‘one click booking’ misleading.
Users also wanted more information regarding the specifics of the restaurant before they committed to making a booking such as menu items, price point and availability.
We made amendments and did another round of testing. We included more information on all of the relevant pages to better explain the selection process of the experiences.
Testing revealed that we had a problem with the booking process as users were not sure what state their booking was in. It was unclear if it was confirmed or not and users felt disappointed as a result. We changed the layout of the my booking pages to have upcoming and past bookings as well as confirmed and pending states. We also included greater feedback with pop ups to clarify the actions taken.
Deliver Phase
Visual Design
It was important for us to maintain the visual style of The Curtain hotel as well as the feel of being in the hotel itself within the app. We used the colour palette and typography that was consistent with The Curtain hotel’s existing style, branding and website.
Mock Up
After multiple iterations and exploring the visual design elements, we were able to produce an interactive mock up.
You can see the finished prototype here: https://invis.io/HQM4EYU3DZ9
Next Steps
We would love to spend more time developing this project, in particular we would be interested in connecting the in hotel services with the app so that guests had greater consistency and support during their stay as well as the facility to making in hotel service bookings and access room information. We would also like to create an app for the club members specifically so that their community can develop its own virtual area to share experiences and recommendations.
Thank you for reading and we hope you enjoy our prototype!
