Redesigning the check in check out experience for customers.

A proposal for a new lobby design and check in journey process.

Zuliandi Azli
Bootcamp
3 min readSep 13, 2023

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How might we redesign a lobby to improve the check in check out experience of customers at an old hotel?

The Problem

Strand Hotel was a prominent hotel along the prime Bencoolen strip of Singapore. Over the years, its popularity has waned and the brand has struggled to portray itself in a contemporary manner. Coupled with a decline in the lobby conditions and gaps in service caused by inefficient space planning, its clientele has decreased. How to improve the experience of the hotel visitor and the operator so that we can create sales uplift for the owner?

Before state of reception area

Strand Hotel is a hospitality establishment in the Orchard Road shopping district in Singapore. The hotel operator was experiencing a decline in the number of its customers, initially pointing to 2 reasons.

1. Retention of walk-ins
2. Retention of extension

Service Blueprint revealing critical points of customer drop offs at certain stages of the journey

We wanted to find out why this was happening. The first step was observation and site studies at the hotel through out the day, interviewing and asking visitors along the way regarding possible pain points that they had. We also took the chance to interview staff on the operator side.

Mapping operational pain points with user pain points

The Pain Points

Both client and the user had individual pain points to be considered in the re design of the lobby. By mapping these two sources of pain points, we were able to focus on shared issues that were deemed of higher priority to tackle. These pain points could be classified into the following: Ambience and Experience. These point to the gaps that needed to be addressed:

Ambience:
Materiality, Lighting

Experience:
Check in timing, Surveillance, Dead Spaces, Lack of Seating, Wayfinding

Left: mapping of operator’s pain points and user pain points in plan | Right: Improvements made in plan to allow for operational efficiency and better user experience

The Proposal

The hotel lobby’s transformation are three fold, lighting, spatial layout and the update to the material finishes. The spherical lighting across the ceiling brightens the space at night from its previous dim conditions. The plan has been reconfigured to allow for better circulation of the hotel staff and the lobby has extended adjacent to the hotel’s entrance, creating more lounging and waiting areas for guests. The finishes have been given a contemporary colour palette and a tactile quality that brings in warmth and respite to the lobby.

Post Script

This project is currently under construction and the first phase of the lobby is underway for completion by the third quarter of 2020.

#userexperience #spatialdesign

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Zuliandi Azli
Bootcamp

A strategic service designer, interested in the creation of innovative value at scale, for businesses & organisations, enabled by human-centred approaches.