What is MEWS?
Mews is a property management system designed to simplify and automate all operations for modern hoteliers and their guests.
Details
My role
The company operates as both B2B and B2C and I was part of the B2B family working on the Mews Operations team. Within the B2B family I have been involved with the accounts team - that focuses on guest and company profiles and portfolio team - which focuses on better overview and management of hotel group portfolio within the system.
Project overview
We needed to find a better way to help receptionists and reservation managers to log all the important information they collect about the guest in order for them to provide high level service and great guest experience. On our platform there was no easy way to do that.
The users
We were focusing on receptionist and reservation managers as these are the main personas that usually work with guest and company profiles.
Roles & responsibilities
This project was part of the accounts team and I was collaborating with a UX researcher as well as stakeholders involved. Together with my team we prioritised this discovery as an important part of the tertile, I then collaborated with our UX researcher and presented the findings to our stakeholders as well as the ideas we had for implementation.
Scope & Constrains
We had a tight deadline for discovery as we also had other project going on in the background. We were not able to develop this straight away due to a change of tertile plan that came from leadership as we had to urgently prioritise other small changes needed for other client to successfully onboard Mews.
Overview
We started by outlining what is the problem we are trying to solve and we tried to understand what research we should conduct. We agreed on the information we had and information needed and we began reaching out to our clients and scheduling initial calls to better understand their current process when it comes to logging in the guest preferences. Some of the insights came straight away allowing us to start brainstorming on how might we help them to solve these problems.
Problem
Guest profiles before the changes - users could log the information regarding guest on classifications section, preffered space features section or general notes
Discovery
In order to understand how hotel staff was collecting guest preferences we conducted around 10 user interviews and as a secondary research we did a desk research to compare how other hotels and our competitors were doing and how they were collecting guest preferences.
UX researcher also suggested doing a focus group but we struggled to find participants to this so we relied on the interviews and desk research. We wanted to understand what is the current way they collect guest information, where do they keep it and how they use it.
After conducting the interviews some of the main insights became evident:
They were relying on our free text notes field to collect any information about the guest but as notes served as a free text field it was hard to filter through the information there and receptionists were spending more time trying to find relevant information.
They wanted to be able to categorise specific preferences like food or allergies, amenities requests and so on.
Some of the properties didn’t have a restaurant so they only wanted to see preferences relevant to their property
Users also wanted customisation available so they could tailor it to their hotel
I made the following hypothesis after analysing the current set up of Mews Operations and the insights from the initial research:
Removing classifications and space features and combining them with guest preferences will reduce the clutter and information will be accessible easier.
Introducing guest preferences settings will allow users flexibility so they can turn specific categories on or off depending on the property they have
After the initial research we also wanted to find out what categories would be important and how they would categorise so on our following interviews we presented them a card sorting exercise where we asked them to move the preferences (that we collected from the research) under specific category and add one if they were missing something
The Solution
We created a prototype showing how the user can first enable categories in the settings menu and then how guest preferences would work on individual profile
Iteration
The feedback we got was overall positive with few things to improve:
Users were still missing customisation and flexibility as they wanted to have freedom to customise everything from categories to the specific features
Make a request button was not visible enough
Current set up of preferred space features were not set up correctly so even if they would create custom fields there, the system was showing the wrong column
Learnings
In order to deliver great experience for receptionists and reservations managers, we had to step away from guest preferences and include other parts of the system like space features and classifications. Analysing the current set up in Mews system helped me identify the existing problems better with the way information is displayed.
As a next iteration I have prioritised the following:
Space features is a feature set up throughout multiple teams and provides additional functionality to the reservation journey that is part of reservation team. As it is a bigger initiative, I've suggested collaborating with the reservation team to tackle this as this was tied together with notes feature they were redesigning
Improving information architecture of classifications, guest preferences and space features to remove information overload