From desktop to mobile
Flexkeeping Evolution: Revitalized hotel ops UX, simplified mobile and desktop work allocation & scheduling.
I joined Flexkeeping as a creative designer, but quickly shifted towards product.
Flexkeeping is a hotel operation platform consisting of desktop and mobile app. It helps hotels and other properties to run their processes better. It optimizes and automates communication, task management, maintenance, housekeeping, audits, procedures compliance, guest services etc.
It is a very extensive product, with many different features so it was quite a learning curve to fully understand it. When I joined there was no design system or guidelines, but there was a lot of legacy, so I had to figure out how to work with it.
I started by creating user personas. I talked to the teams that are the most in contact with our users and also went on field to do some research. In total I created 9 user personas, below you can see 4 of them. They served as a base for the next 2 years, for all the design decisions.
In the 2 years, there were many small and also big design changes made. We created a few new features from scratch and made improvements on hundreds small ones. Among other we started implementing unified design system based on Material Design and did a color refresh.
Because the software is too broad to showcase everything here, I decided to show two processes when we were creating new features. One on mobile and the other for desktop.
Work allocation Mobile
The task was to improve the current work allocation on mobile to make it easier and faster. The process started with analysing the current flow and pin-pointing all the unnecessary steps and flaws. We managed to really simplify the process, so the UX flow seen below is quite straight forward. The UX was first done together with the PM on the whiteboard and later I made some improvements and prepared it in Whimsical. After we tested if the flow is user friendly, I went to Sketch to design the visual layer of it.
The biggest challenge for me was always to keep the look and feel of the app trough-out the entire experience, while still making some design improvements. The visual improvements were always created in a way that we could later on implement it in other parts of the app. The design process is always aligned with development team, so that we optimised also their efforts and time, while making new design layouts.
Scheduling Desktop
Scheduling was a long-requested feature that would allow users to plan their shifts for weeks in advance. We thought a weekly calendar view is the best for this purpose while having in mind that we will use this view also for other purposes. The main goal here was to create a very simple flow while allowing users to fully customize the schedules. One option is to simply allow us to calculate the schedule for you with the click of the button, based on your settings. The other option is to click and change the status from non assigned to working or with the right-click access to additional options.
The process was the same as usual:
interviews-white board-UX HF wireframes-UI in Sketch-prototype-test-fix-development.
The biggest challenge with this interface was how to fit a big amount of information into one view while paying a lot of attention to hierarchy. We had to be sure that the user first finds the most important bits and then can dive into the information more in detail if desired. The layout had to be flexible, so we can add settings later and turn it into a monthly and daily view.
I decided to show the most important information with colors, so that is the first thing that pops-up. The make it even more understandable I added icons and put the information in the hierarchy of information that we thought is the most applicable for users.
This is directly connected to mobile, where employees can see their schedule on mobile phones. A very simple interface with colour coding for visibility and clarity.
Since I joined Flexkeeping, I implemented many new changes, from introducing new colours, restructuring the web interface, introducing the same design guidelines etc. I'm still not happy with the end result, because I think there is so much more that can be done. But I'm still proud how far we got from the old version, so I'm showing some bits and pieces of the mobile app.
