#1 Starting in the hard mode

The year was 2018. My first project as a UX Designer was a challenge — not just for being the “official” first project in the company, but also for its context.

Photo: Monstera Production/Pexels

And the context was:

  • We had to redesign an exceedingly complex corporate hotel booking system, with loads of details about hospitality and the tourism industry;
  • This client had their dev team, which was working with the back-end services, while our team was working with the front-end projects, but each team had waaaay different work methods, and so communication and day-to-day work were not easy;
  • Beyond this tough path, there was another problem: people who work in this industry are used to calling the same things different names, and, sometimes, they use the same terms for different things, so I was going crazy trying to understand everything that was going on!

Despite all the difficulty, those odds helped me exercise creativity — and fight against my insecurities — to deliver good work. Here I will talk about some of the main challenges I had in this project.

My first objective was to guarantee that we all were speaking “the same language”. For that, I suggested a meeting with our client and representative people from the different personas of this project, which ranged from small hotels to big hotel chains. Then, I started writing some terms on the whiteboard and asking them for all the meanings those terms could have, so we created a Mind Map together, which prompted a discussion about each word, where it became apparent that different segments of the hotel industry used those terms in different ways. After that discussion, we latched one meaning onto each word that everyone could understand and agree to.

Co-created mind map with the users.

The next step was to “bring to the table” people from the backstage: the client’s backoffice team. They knew, more than anyone, the problems the system had. After this interview, we found that the main problem was with hotel registration. It was way too long for the hotel administrator and required a lot of manual steps from the backoffice team.

To simplify this flow, I turned it into a wizard with clear communication of each step, and in doing so, leaving only the essentials for backoffice team approve.

Milestones, steps, and inputs states for hotel registration.

Once we knew that some points of sale would use this system interface directly for the customer, the idea was to use the same interface for showing the hotel’s information and its changes. The inspiration for it was the Google Business pages.

Hotel page.

Another big challenge I had with this project was the fee management. The system should let the hotel administrator create different fees for each room type, and those fees could have different policies and inherited rules, everything in an intuitive interface, of course. After creating the structure, I could conduct remote and presential usability tests with different hotel administrators and, after some tweaking, the final interface came to life:

Fee configuration page.

The last challenge I want to talk about is the calendar. It was not a simple calendar page, but one with a lot of features: bulk actions, search using filters, seeing and creating different fees for each hotel room, blocking dates, monitoring the capacity for each day, and much more. In the first version I tried to keep it as clean as possible, but stakeholders wanted the features all on the same page, so it was quite tricky to keep a good and flowing usability with so many actions, but I worked hard on it:

Final calendar page.

The first suggestion for the calendar page.

I’d have many more things to talk about this project, but I just wanted to bring here the *main* moments of it, moments that lead me to the next level as Designer.

Here are 3 things I learned with this project:

  1. Communication is the main point. The harder the moment of the project was, the more communication we had to have with the team, the users and the stakeholders to guarantee we were all looking for the same goal. This much may seem obvious, I know, but sometimes, when starting out, it’s not so clear to everyone.
  2. Negotiation with stakeholders only works if we know about what they really care. As UX Designer I can’t just talk about the experience for users — I have to go deeper and understand how this experience could impact their profits, or their expenses, for example.
  3. Practice can be quite different from theory, and that’s the best part of it! We learn how and when to apply a variety of tools for research and ideation, for example, but in practice, we have to adapt and be creative to get the best of each tool. And I love it!