Redifining Online Hotel Guest Relationships in the Middle-East

Receiving payments online from guests should be a quick and painless process with as little stress as possible. So how to create a payment collection system that’s made with the Hospitality Industry in mind?

Objective/Challange

Collecting international online payments from guests is typically very cumbersome because of the financial structure in the Middle-East. Our task was to create a product which streamlined this process using a user-centered design mindset.

Role

UX/UI Design Lead

Discover

First understand the initial assumptions and conduct competitor analysis with best in class digital proudcts.

User Testing

Usability testing along with online surveys gave us insights into the every day pain points and user experiences while trying to complete the simple task of creating invoices and collecting payments from hotel guests.

User Journey - Gautam Sharma (Without EasyPay)

User Flows

We sat down everyday for a couple of hours and created userflows. Flowcharts of how the user journey should look like within the app. I then mapped them our on Figma. This process helped me understand the logistical requirments and technical limitations of the project better.

Expected User Flow - New Invoice

Defining our Ideal Users

 I finalized a few personas which represented the majourity of our users. I tried my best to put down their background, personal life, preferences, motivations, aspirations, influences, thier ease with technology, I also tried to encompass all the questions our users will ask about the product.

User Persona - Sana
User Persona - Gautam Sharma

Brain Storming

We ran 30 minute sessions addressing as many pain points as possible. Once we laid out everything in front of use, we were then able to talk to the developers to understand the complications and limitations we need to keep in mind.

Sketches - EasyPay Screens

Prototyping

I developed some low to mid-fidelity prototypes and were in a first round of user testing. From there we validated our hypothesis. After a little bit of tweaking hi-fidelity protopyes were made and handed over for development.

Dashboard Hi-Fidelity Prototypes
Create Invoice Hi-Fidelity Prototype - Step 1
Create Invoice Hi-Fidelity Prototype - Step 3
Create Invoice Hi-Fidelity Prototype - Step 4
Invoice Reports Hi-Fidelity Prototype
Invoice Reports Export Hi-Fidelity Prototype
Onboarding Hi-Fidelity Prototype
Sample Email-Invoice Prototypes

Testing and Iterations

I wroked with Incrementl till January 2021. Till then I worked closely to test, re-test, run identify pain points and iterate to solve them.

User Journey - Gautam Sharma (With EasyPay)

Learnings

  • Some processes can be long and complicated, adding step-by-step guides for first initial few times can be be very helpful for a new user to pickup the product quickly.
  • We used Creative Tim’s Material Dashboard for React as a base template. It was responsive but not what we had in mind for our users. So a lot of effort went into customizing it.
  • Reduce clutter and allow a user to read more if they want to and only display the necessary information that a user will need to complete his or her task.
  • Try to get as much information autofilled as possible during creating new invoices.
  • Transparency is the key. Keep your user informed about the next step in the process proactively.