Optima is a comprehensive hotel management system used to streamline a variety of hotel operations, including property management, reservations management, and customer relationship management.
While my project teammate worked as a receptionist in a hotel, he noticed that most of the employees who worked with Optima had difficulty completing their tasks on time. This caused problems with hotel revenues. We decided to challenge ourselves to redesign it for our portfolio's project.
We had 3 weeks to redesign the system as part of our challenge, and we decided to choose one group of users to make our process more reliable and accurate. Furthermore, we could easily reach them and get better help as part of our research, which was very helpful.
Receptionists have difficulty learning and using the system because of its complexity and incompatibility with their daily tasks, such as taking orders, gathering relevant hotel information, and charging guests.
Here you can see overloaded sections, buttons that look the same, and unfamiliar icons without labels - both UX and UI are lacking, so users make mistakes.
We managed to get help from 6 receptionists users, 4 of them were 20-25 years old and the other 2 were 45-50 years old. It was critical to interview 2 different age groups to see how each manages the system. We developed a set of questions that deal mainly with their daily use of the system.
Our next step was to prioritize our answers and group them into main issues. This helped us focus on our users' main concerns. We then created our main insights based on our most crucial issues.
We developed a set of features that will help our users achieve their goals in a more effective way after creating the main insights.
The goal in this phase was to make each screen user-friendly and organized, so we removed 30% of the elements that were not used from each screen, and simplified the interface to make it easier to use.
The "Arrival Screen" allows receptionists to see detailed guest information, including check-in times and room assignments, and perform quick actions like checking in guests, changing bookings, and adding special requests. There were 19 unused buttons on the screen that overloaded it, and the guest details were too wide for receptionists to scan.
The "Forecast Screen" provides a real-time overview of the status of all rooms in the hotel. It shows which rooms are occupied, available, or out of service. This screen included too many colors and irrelevant details, receptionists struggled to understand which room is still available and filtering the rooms was too complex for them.
Individual Reservation Screen shows details about a specific guest's reservation. It includes the guest's personal details, reservation dates, room type and number, special requests, payment information, and any additional services.
The biggest challenge of this project was understanding the different components of the system and how they work, but it was also an interesting and challenging project at the same time. To succeed in our challenge goal of redesigning the dashboard in three weeks, I think the decision to design three main screens was a good choice.