CLERATE - Hospitality Management Mobile App
Clerate aims to be a competitor in the customer relationship management (CRM) industry.
At its current stage the company is specifically focusing on gig economy staffing for hotel housekeeping.
The Challenge
Creating an integrated system that connects housekeepers eager to work, with hotel departments that face personnel shortages in pandemic times.
The Goal
To build the employer side of the staffing product to assure quality staffing and housekeeping management, as well as build a stepping stone for a future hotel CRM.
My Role (UX Designer on a 2 person design team + client)
Research, Strategy, Design, User Testing
Tools Used
Figma, Maze User Diagnostics
Timeline
1 Month
Deliverables
Styleguide, High-Fi Wireframes & Flows, Mobile Prototype
Discovery
How does the industry work?
For the competitive analysis, we took a look at the maid staffing websites MaidPro and Care.com. Although overall their model is not entirely compatible with the hotel industry, being a gig economy employment model we were able to pull some useful tools many of which we implemented into our product.
Pros: Task Checklists, Calendar Scheduling, Employee Profiles, Rating Systems
Cons: No features for multiple employees at once, Mostly private and individual hires
Interviewing the professionals
The one and only way to truly know what a product needs, is to hear from the people using it in a real world environment. I was able to interview multiple hospitality managers with included hotel management and restaurant experience to get real world feedback on the products they use and need.
One of their biggest concerns was that often software is not intuitive, outdated, slow and most importantly not very adaptable in fast paced hospitality environments. It also gave us some insight as to what the daily tasks of managers are and what software they used.
“I think it comes down to how easy the system makes it to modify according to each department. Adaptability.”
Merging stakeholders and users
Inspect
Manage
Schedule
It became very evident that we needed to build a product that combines, organization and overview with measurable performance.
The Hotel: Needed to measure its numbers, such as inventory and labor
The Management: Needed to assure quality work and rate employees
Designing Solutions
Inspect
A section for the tracking of data, inventory and quality contol
Clear visualisation of trackable data
Client can calculate and adjust business cost according to real time updates
Manage
Employees need to be managed and evaluated in order to keep quality control.
built in a rating system to keep track of employee performance and ranking
-the ability to add or cut back staff to stay within hotel need
Schedule
As with any staffing, employees must be scheduled and distributed among tasks
overview of all staff
ability to place them in favored sections
employee rankings are shown to be able to place them according to status as well.
VIP Employees = VIP Scheduling
Styleguide
I modeled our project with a classic blue color theme to compliment the style and feel of its green counterpart. Distinguishing the company side to the employee side.
Blue tones give the same clean and elegant feel, reminiscent of corporate business as well as housekeeping uniforms.
Deliverable:
A consistent brand look across a previous design and our prototype so that our client is able to present the entire application for development and funding.
The Results
User Testing
For the evaluation of the Clerate Management app, Maze User Diagnostics was used. This tool was incredibly helpful as it shows exactly where users click indicating whether or not the actions are clear and easily accessible. Amongst some minor discrepancies, a few main things came to light that need to be improved upon.
Search Feature
“There should be a search feature to find the page of a specific individual”
Based on a unanimous request, a search bar was added for easier more efficient selection of staff. Although buttons were in place to search staff by ranking users wanted to also be able to input specific staff members for a quicker search process.
Eliminating unnecessary clicks
In certain parts of the app there were too many clickable options, or users found them confusing, users preferred to have options simplified. Another issue was with some of the UI, round corners and drop shadows usually indicated buttons/clickable features.
Unnecessary steps were eliminated and some buttons cut entirely. To indicate current steps flat graphic banners with sharp edges were implimented.
Future Improvements:
→ Missing back links were implemented. A couple more rounds of user testing would be ideal to work out any leftover kinks.
→One user pointed out that long-pressing menu buttons might be a nice solution since our app has a lot of submenus to navigate through
→ Animations could be helpful and also make the navigation more enjoyable
Reflections
Overall I am so proud of what our team built in just 4 weeks.
I found myself enjoying the research part of the project quite a bit as it was also a familiar industry to me, doing interviews and setting up information architecture was challenging but fun. I also had to opportunity to spend more time with Figma than I had previously and look forward to using Figma software more in the future.
Take away, having a team with a variety of strengths and interests makes for a better product and a great learning environment.
