Smart Checklist

Helping small hotel owners get to know their property management system.

Little Hotelier is a property management system that helps small hotels manage bookings and run their properties.

To run a property, hotel owners must learn key concepts such as broadcasting to booking channels, optimizing guests comms (such as invoices and automated emails) and effective inventory and room rates management.

Configuring Little Hotelier ongoingly was challenging for users unfamiliar with property management concepts, a common quality of small hotel operators.

Little hotelier's configuration system was sophisticated but more suited for highly experienced hotel industry workers.

This made Little Hotelier challenging to understand and configure properly for a target group largely unfamiliar with PMS systems and the various concepts required to use them.

Because of this, customers would often engage in multiple direct calls with onboarding specialists who would guide them through certain configuration changes in a step-by-step manner.

Little Hotelier's setup screen and guided help content lacked a clear structure to help users find the settings they needed.

To find a solution that would empower users to self-serve their adjustment of configurations, several obstacles needed to be overcome:

  • Pages involving setup tasks existed in different areas of the product, and at times with different navigation schemes and design patterns.

  • The product itself required fairly manual operations to complete certain tasks.

  • Many customers typically lacked experience with computers and complex programs.

  • Several features could be irrelevant or critical to customers depending on their type of property and context.

An easy to find, consolidated and intelligent checklist that could emulate onboarding specialists' hand holding.

Initial research and discovery sessions revealed that making sweeping changes to Little Hotelier's setup page and its nested controls would be fraught with severe technical challenges.

It was decided that while the Little Hotelier set up page was being refactored, an easily accessible checklist of recommended tasks would be created on top of the web application. This checklist would introduce users to key concepts and over time populate itself with conditional tasks depending on the their needs.

Engineering was consulted from the outset and weekly design reviews helped identify requisite setup actions and distil them into a prioritized task list, with plans to expand the kinds of optimizations it could deliver after initial launch.

It was initially assumed that users valued simplicity over detailed explainations.

Concept testing was a key milestone in the project and the direction of the smart checklist's UI. Working intently to align PM's and executive stakeholders on key assumptions around user attitudes towards information density, various prototypes were tested on customers and non-customers in Europe, Australia and the U.S.

Key findings helped challenge existing assumptions held by the team:

  • Users wanting more clarity around tasks and a preference for more text rather than less.

  • Users preferring to control when tasks were ‘dismissed’ from the list instead of having it done automatically - evidently due to the fear of the information being presented being unrecoverable.

  • Users wanting to only focus on a few tasks at a time, with little interest in seeing all tasks at once.

The behaviour of the checklist focussed on clear interactions and fluid motion to make it dynamic and approachable.

The behaviour of the smart checklist orientated around users' need for a sense of control and understanding of individual functions of the platform which would be used again and again in future.

  • More, rather than less descriptive messaging was included on tasks.

  • When certain tasks were automatically 'completed' on the list, this event triggered only when the user opened the list to see the task state transition.

In addition, the behaviour of tasks being added to the system would be developed and evolved in nature over time. A logic for handling task delivery into the checklist was co-workshopped with engineers eventually forming a stack-ranked 'task queue' which helped account for all possible states and edge cases the checklist's dynamic behaviour could lead to.

(My time at SiteMinder ended before initiative launched.)