Hotel Management System done in few days. Rapid design sprint facilitated without any worries

From requirements engineering to a successful, award-winning PWA that makes running a hotel a child’s play

Client

Avisio

Scope

Design Thinking, Service Design, UX Design, Handoff, Team management

Role

Lead Product Designer

Agency

Monterail

Overview

Avisio co-founders reached us for expertise on their initial proof of concept idea for a hotel management system aimed towards premium hotel owners & managers. I was the only person from Monterail in this project during its initial stage (figuring out the scope of work, putting together business & project requirements, etc.), while later on - a Lead Product Designer for the MVP phase & development handoff.

Product definition & research01

During 2 days of "Rapid Design Sprint" (instead of 4, I went with it through days 1 & 2, while doing all the deliverables instead of getting a proper sleep), because I have the stakeholders in one room with me, my goal was to get the potential product features & have a rough idea of how the potential scope of work will look like.
I went with:
 • Value proposition mapping
 • MoSCoW analysis
 • Impact-effort matrix
to finalize a feature list and mapped out the product before day 2. Some of the BTS photos can be found on the right.

Later that day, I conducted extensive research on hotel management systems to understand what features were commonly included and what could be improved upon. Then, I gathered insights from hotel managers and staff to understand their pain points and needs. This allowed me to create a user-centered design that would meet the needs of all folks in the room.

Design & handoff 02

I started the design process by creating user personas, user journeys, and sketches of the user interface (UI). Since the project was a proof of concept, I focused on creating a simple and easy-to-use UI that would showcase the product's main features, and went through my proposals with the co-founders of Avisio.

To ensure that the design was intuitive and user-friendly, I tested the prototype with a small group of hotel managers we're a part of Avisio's holding group, and it all went quite well, although the designs needed an adjustment to be iPad-first.

After getting back to Poland, I started a UX team onboarding to get familiar with the project and the next steps in terms of design. I created a set of guidelines, a tiny Design System to be sure that the additional UI elements will be aligned with the existing ones. I introduced a pair of designers to Matthias and Osama (Avisio co-founders) and took the management role in this specific project. From there I was running dailies with the UX team, and weeklies with the client, just to be sure that we were all still on the same page & on point with the design, functionality & dates.

During this project, we're also trying to move completely from Sketch to Adobe Xd - I do feel guilty for this transition but in a good way. I was teaching our 6 other UX designers how to prototype in Xd while using Avisio app screens as an example/playground. Many of these "practice animations" made their way to the final product.

Result 03

Avisio is today an award-winning PWA while being used by thousands of hotel managers and in hundreds of hotels, B&Bs, etc. Most important thing is that the design is identical to the one I did in Vienna while eating a schnitzel.

The outcome

Modern, minimal, easy-to-use hotel management system, that is ready for any language you can potentially imagine translating your content to. A few slick animations and options to change the look & feel of the app are most definitely a reason for this app's buzz

Conclusion

This was one of the toughest projects for me personally. I was a sales guy, a business analyst, a product owner & a product designer for the first half of Avisio's SDLC. Later on, I focused on the managing role, to be double sure that the rest of the product design team in Monterail will have what's needed to maintain & expand Avisio's features & functionalities. A lot of onboarding, mentorship, and design critique made this project unique.

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