Kathryn Sadler

SiteMinder Insights – Data visualisation & reporting

Overview
I led the research and UX design for the enhancement of SiteMinder's relatively new pricing intelligence product, which gave hoteliers up-to-date market data allowing them to compare their room rates to those of competitors to ensure a level of parity. The first iteration of the product was quite limited in functionality, so the intention was to identify gaps and provide additional features to benefit our customers with their daily revenue management functions.

We followed a process of in-depth research followed by thorough analysis and synthesis of our findings to identify key insights, which enabled us to narrow down and prioritise the most important areas of reporting to benefit our customers. We ideated components using different data visualisation approaches, creating wireframes and prototypes of the MVP reports which we then obtained further user feedback on for subsequent iteration.

Key components:

• User interviews & transcription

• Research analysis & synthesis

• Affinity mapping

• Problem statement & MVP definition

• Ideation

• Sketching & prototyping

• Design research & iteration

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RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

User interviews
We completed in-depth interviews with SiteMinder hotelier customers world-wide. The Product Manager had already reached out internally to identify customers who may be open to participating in our research.

I formalised the research process by creating a research plan to identify our goals and clarify our target demographics. I also created a detailed discussion guide which was invaluable to guide the conversations with our users whilst providing structure and consistency with our questions.

I supported the Product Manager to facilitate the interviews, as he was the subject matter expert on the topic of hotel revenue management so he was able to dig deeper about more complex aspects of the topic. I focussed on coaching him about user research best practices and acted as the note-taker during the interviews.

I made the decision to type up full transcriptions of each interview from my handwritten notes and the interview recordings. Although this was time-consuming, the detailed transcripts were invaluable during our analysis in order to identify and pull out key insights and patterns.

Generic research learnings
SiteMinder’s UX maturity level was quite low during the early stages of my time there, so I compiled learnings from our user research and shared them internally to help with advocacy of user experience and research. Here are a selection of them:

Recruitment

• Allow sufficient time for recruitment & scheduling – especially when working with different time zones. (Our recruitment process dragged out somewhat!)

• Recruit to your target user base and ensure the right spread. (As recruitment was already underway when I joined the project, target demographics were a bit of an afterthought – but we got lucky and managed to speak to a variety of roles at different sized properties across several regions.)

• Do some preliminary research on participants beforehand to be more familiar with their role, business, background, etc.

Facilitation

• Ideally have both a facilitator and notetaker in every interview.

• Record interviews (if the participant consents) – especially if there is no notetaker!

• Debrief immediately after each interview if at all possible and discuss high-level takeaways.

• Interview one person at a time. (Two or more people can get very confusing - especially by phone!)

• Ask the same key questions to all participants, to help identify common findings later (e.g. top 3 metrics).

Analysis & synthesis
I worked closely with the Product Manager to review our detailed interview transcripts, extract key findings and identify any common patterns.

Affinity mapping
We firstly noted the top three metrics that each hotelier had mentioned they track regularly. We then pulled out wishlist items, positives and negatives of a dashboard-style report interface, etc.

We applied an affinity map technique to identify patterns, grouping our initial findings by common themes.

IDEATION

Problem statement & Proto-personas
The research we had completed up to this point enabled us to refine the problem that we had aimed to solve with our product enhancements, and narrow down the customer types that the improved product could benefit.

Analysis learnings
We identified key learnings from our analysis and synthesis which we again shared internally:

DESIGN

Early on in the project I had introduced the Double Diamond process model to the Product Manager I was collaborating with, and at this stage in the project we entered the third phase of that process, where our discovery and definition work enabled us to start ideating possible solutions to the problem we had defined.

MVP & Sketching
We listed key features and priorities using the MoSCoW technique and identified three primary reports for our MVP: Pickup, Channel Mix and Demand. I sketched ideas as to how we could communicate the data clearly in each of these reports.

Our key stakeholder was accustomed to seeing polished UI designs rather than sketches or wireframes, so the draft reports were polished very quickly by the UI Designer to give him a better idea of the high fidelity look.

Design research & iteration

Before we progressed too far with UI Design and moved into development, we interviewed more hoteliers to get their impressions of these initial MVP reports. Some were participants from our first research phase, and others were new contacts via our SME.

We were careful not to refer to this as “validation”, which would have implied that we were merely looking for sign-off from users. We needed to keep an open mind to any changes we might need to make, whether big or small.

Additionally, rather than showing the participants the high fidelity UI designs, I drew up neater wireframe sketches of the reports to get feedback on. These were basically reverse-engineered from the UI designs, which had evolved somewhat from the original draft sketches. I was conscious that users tend to be more open to giving critical feedback if they don’t think they’re looking at a finished product.

Feedback was overall very positive with no major red flags. Only a few minor tweaks to the designs were required before we moved onto the build phase.

CONCLUSION

At this stage in the project, the stakeholder focus shifted heavily towards Build commencement. We were keen to get to a position where we could release a Beta version of the product, as given the nature of the content (analytics) we knew that we would get rich feedback from Beta testing with actual data that was relevant to our users.

The development team encountered some major technical issues during build, which delayed the release significantly. By the time the product was released I had started a new role at another company, but I was informed about the success of the launch from my colleague. The new capabilities generated interest within the hospitality industry–below are press releases and the marketing video.