SiteMinder, Property Platform - 2021
My Role
Research, Information Architecture, Rapid Prototyping, Visual Design, User Flows
Team
Henry Westmacott, PM
Martin Walsh, PE
Heidi Egger, HoD
Aida Abbasi, PD
Timeline & Status
3 Months
Overview
My role as product designer was to service design a seamless self served activation and mapping experience for hoteliers.
Working with my product manager, I led the end-to-end design efforts and shaped the product vision based on customer research insights and business goals.
The experience design was used as a blueprint for other integration with major partners and vendors including Expedia, Agoda and AirBnb.
Company website
THE COMPANY
SiteMinder is a leading hotel commerce platform founded in 2006, headquartered in Sydney, Australia. The company specializes in providing cloud-based solutions to help hotels manage and optimize their distribution channels, increase direct bookings, and streamline operations.
Hotel customers globally
Countries
Partner ecosystem
Hotel reservations annually
Hotel revenue annually
as an industry leader
HIGHLIGHTS
Channel room type mapping motion concept
Channel synced successfully
Sample UI components.
Content sync landing page
Core component catalogue.
CONTEXT
Onboarding some customers are harder than others.
Each customer has unique setup.
Onboarding agents encounter significant challenges when configuring properties that lack channel manager room type, rate plan, and room rate settings, especially when adding Booking.com as a channel.
Booking.com rate configuration flow
Overhead
Onboarding staff and support agents spend most of their time doing manual tasks including creating room types, mapping rates in an old admin portal.
Time consuming
Both customers and staff spend time on phone and computers to receptive set up tasks instead of doing high business value activities.
Error prone
Due to nature of manual works, the amount of bad information produced as results of users' mistake were significant.
THE PROJECT
Design process
Design process
FRAMING THE PROBLEM
EMERGING OPPORTUNITIES
What if …
IF
The users can complete the Booking.com activation and bulk mapping journey themselves with far fewer steps
AND
Onboarding agents no longer need to use admin portal to manually import and mapping rates.
THEN
The business can use resources more effectively, lead more revenue.
IF
The users can manage rooms, rates, property content from all channels without leaving SiteMinder.
AND
There would be no information inconsistency issue existing across different channels.
THEN
The customer's business is more effective. They are happy and loyal.
HYPOTHESIS
We believe that customers will experience a faster, more transparent, and confidence-building setup process.
By a self-service channel setup and mapping process that includes clear instructions and automated checks for channel configuration discrepancies..
This will reduce their reliance on support staff, decrease onboarding time, and improve overall satisfaction and trust in our platform.
conceptualisation
Reimagine ideal customer experience look and feel like.
Contraints
Scalable
Design paradigms introduced within this tooling should be scalable to be used for other channels in the future (i.e. Expedia, Agoda…)
Simplicafication
Ability to manually connect BDC as well as edit BDC room-id’s and rate-id’s via admin will no longer be available when the channel membership is content enabled.
Managable
Bdc only allows a max of 400 room rates by default (only higher in exceptional circumstances).
User journey
I've worked with internal and external stakeholders to capture holistic, high level experience across different touch points and channels. First step to establish official service blueprint for the project.
Future state user journey
Userflow
A detailed user experience flow was mapped to align on common paths that users go through when setup Booking.com as a channel.
User flow - Happy path
Wireframes
Simple wireframe and lo-fi prototype were developed to make sure I socialise my concept with with engineers and stakeholders effectively at the early stage.
First wireframes
DESIGN
Soft guided self-service set up process
North star design principles
Thoughtful
Design with empathy; anticipate user needs.
Trustful
Build trust through transparency and integrity
Reliable
Consistent, dependable, always deliver excellence.
I proposed several new paradigms to guide customers through the self-service setup, one of which is a interactive data matching interface. This allow users to easily select which piece of data they want to use on both platform.
Channel discovery UI
Channel room rate import wizard UI
Booking.com channel connection status
Basic input selectors
This pattern show only fields that contain discrepancies and allow users to simply choose data they wanted to use.
Data matching - Option 1 - Field selectors
Or, revealing which fields need attention
This new design pattern was design to solve room type attribute discrepancies between Booking.com and SiteMinder
The challenge of using pattern was to display range of different field types and content length. The UI would be not aesthetic and pleasing to use.
Data matching - Option 2 - Field selectors with tweaks
Data matching table
Another option was to display all discrepancies in one big table. This was my favourite option because it offer transparency and clarity for users.
Data matching - Option 3 - Table
Data matching - Option 2 - Field selectors with tweaks
USABILITY TESTING SUMMARY
Testing uncovered few unexpected.
Extensive and insightful
We put a med-fi prototype (after multiple rounds of iteration) in front of users during moderated and unmoderated sessions. With unmoderated tests, we aimed to validate common navigating behaviours across vast and diverse group of participant.
To understand deeply users pain points of going zero to one in setting up Booking.com throughout entire process, I did two more rounds of virtual moderated usability testing.
Usertesting and documentation
What are key insights
Validated
Bulk import and mapping interactions are well-received. 80% of participants were able to completed these tasks with confidence.
Suggested next best actions worked well. They kept participants focused so they can complete series of tasks more efficiently.
Smart default mechanic proved useful when participants needed to select large number of records.
Unvalidated
80% of participants were not able to completed the task in one go due to interruption. They often need to go resume ongoing task in different time of the day.
About 20% of participants who are new in the business were not able to tell differences between rate plans and room rates. However this did not prevent them to complete the tasks.
100% of participants selected all data from one platform to remove all discrepancies, instead of mix selection.
REFINE
UX updates
Give users more control
Take pressure off the users by allowing them to postpone a task and resume it when they want.
Incomplete tasks can be found on dashboard and smart guide
Updated modal UX
Sequential dialog interaction
Assist when needed
By proactively surface important information that might help user to complete the task without leave the platform
New contextual guidance elements
Bulk actions
Hotel owners are generally time-poor. Adding a bulk action feature allow them quickly select multiple records and eliminate repetitive tasks.
Channel discovery UI
IMPACTS
Objectives and key results
Improvement in setup process
Achieve a 20% increase in the number of customers completing the Booking.com setup process without any support intervention by the end of the next quarter
Reduce the number of Booking.com onboarding-related support requests by 50% over the next three months.
Reduce error & discrepancies rate
Reduce user error rate during the onboarding process by 40% within the next three months.
Achieve a 90% success rate in automated configuration checks, ensuring discrepancies are resolved before completion.
Increase in CSAT & NPS
Increase Customer Satisfaction score for the onboarding process from 70% to 85% by the end of the next quarter.
Improve the Net Promoter Score for the onboarding process from +20 to +40 within six months.
World class partnership
Booking.com Premier connectivity partner
With the new solution, we achieved highest partnership status with Booking.com, upgraded from Advanced to Premier.
Premier
Connectivity Partner
RETROSPECTIVE
Ambiguity is a blessing
We then interview customers to fully empathise their pain points and validate our assumptions.
Discovering prospects within limitations
Examining limitations from varied angles was instrumental in creating fresh strategies to address other restrictions.
Involve cross-functional partners from the beginning
This ensured a comprehensive progression of the project — efficiently considering both content strategy and technical viability early on.
Minimalism prioritised reducing complexity, not quantity
If an extra step resulted in a more instinctive and mistake-free journey, then it should be encouraged to enhance customer experience.
