UX annoyances at a Holiday Inn
Hotel design annoyances and software parallels
Published in
5 min readAug 20, 2019
I stayed at a Holiday Inn recently and couldn’t help but find several UX annoyances over the 2-night trip.
Annoyance #1: Finding my room
Right off the bat I had trouble finding my room. There were 3 floors in the hotel but I was in room 402 — which is (almost) always a fourth-floor room. Turns out the room wasn’t even on the third floor, but on the second.
Easy solution
Create 4-digit number system if there are more than 100 rooms per floor. Rooms 402–416 could be 2102–2116.
Software design parallel
Room discovery is like the hotel-equivalent to the login process, since this will be users’ first impression of the product. Thus, room discovery should be as intuitive as possible.
Annoyance #2: Hanging my towel
The Holiday Inn made it very clear that they wanted guests to reuse towels. They posted several signs, including this one below:
