Setup Wizard
Helping small hotel owners get setup onto a complex property management system.
Little Hotelier is a property management system used by small hotel owners (often boutiques and small b&b's) to take and manage bookings, set room pricing, check-in/out guests and manage payments.
To get setup, new customers needed to input several details about their properties. This process involved navigating to a setup page and adding in details as required.
For small property owners, getting set up was a serious challenge and CX agents were often required to guide them through the process step-by-step.
Configurations and data-sets needed to get started on Little Hotelier included:
Existing reservations.
Room configurations and names.
Rate configurations and rules.
Property photos and features.
Tax information.
Interviews and contextual studies repeatedly showed that target customers were not tech-savvy, experienced with property management conventions nor interested in dealing with complex setups in order to optimize their operations. They were instead largely motivated by the day-to-day duties of running a small property and the rewarding feeling of servicing guest's needs.
As a result, CX agents were increasingly relied upon to setup the software on users' behalf, often spending weeks with them on numerous phone calls before they could even start using the software properly.
After workshops with CX and engineers, it was decided to recreate the step-by-step setup process through a setup wizard.
An augmented onboarding process was chosen as simple, lean way to release an improved experience to new customers as quickly as possible.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, direct customer outreach was limited and interviews with internal onboarding specialists and research on competitors and partners (such as AirBnb and Booking.com) formed the basis of initial research.
Key insights uncovered included:
Varied use and understanding of industry jargon and conventions.
A tendency to complete onboarding in multiple sessions due to lack of access to information.
A lack of motivation to self-troubleshoot problems and learn new concepts.
The minimum requirements to successfully setup and start using the product was determined through in-depth tech discussions with engineering. Several requirements were loosened as a result of these discussions.
Initial logic flow showing onboarding phases and conditional logic requirements.
Designs were iterated on and socialized frequently throughout the design process.
The impact of COVID-19 on the travel industry meant that priorities and requirements shifted several times throughout the project.
To meet the demands of a broad and distributed stakeholder group, design changes and updates were socialised as rapidly as possible. Flows and wireframes helped maintain clarity and alignment and a living Figma prototype link was developed for visibility of updates and changes.
Mid-way through the project, another designer was brought in as a direct report to help maintain the velocity of design output required.
Holistic frameworks rather than page-specific behaviours were developed to provide
The solution was designed with modular components and layouts structured to be as extensible as possible post-launch.
To keep messaging and content organised, a systematic approach to help content and learning information was created in conjunction with another designer in a seperate team.
To allow parts of the user journey to be re-ordered or adjusted, sections were designed with modality.
To build around a phased-release schedule, additional functionality was viewed as an additive layer on top of the primary architecture. Future enhancements would be augmentative rather than destructive of initial release architecture.
The design of the setup process took the form of a multi-step wizard with each step designed to guide new customers through sections they would struggle with. Numerous rounds of feedback and iteration lead to the initial release version of the wizard — itself a single step in the multi-stepped evolution of the product.
Following launch, onboarding specialists who still assisted customers with the setup process were able to provide feedback and suggestions on the effectiveness of language and copy used in the wizard. Several feedback loops on comprehension gaps were filled in a matter of days.
While not eliminating CX assistance entirely, the wizard initially reduced the average assisted time to onboard new customer's reservations from a weeks to hours. Onboarding staff reported more and more customers completing the process unassisted, with around 50 customers a day successfully onboarding themselves without any assistance.