Hotel Housekeeping App
A confidential UI/UX design engagement for a hotel housekeeping and operations app, from first wireframes to finished high-fidelity screens, with naming and a feature plan measured against the platforms hotels already used. We are under NDA, so we can share our approach, just not the client or the product.
Confidential engagement · under NDA
Confidential · Hospitality startup
Mobile app, with desktop parity
UI/UX design, wireframes, high-fidelity design, naming, competitive analysis
The brief
This project stays private. In 2018 a hospitality founder brought us in to design an app for hotel housekeeping and operations staff: one place to see which rooms need work, who has them, and what has been waiting too long. The goal was to beat the tools hotels already had, not just match them. What we can talk about is how we approached the design and what we handed back. You will not see the client, the product name, or the actual screens here. The image above stands in for them.
What we designed
We started with wireframes, walked through live in screen-sharing sessions so the client could react to the flow rather than a document. From there we ran a naming session with one of our designers and carried the app through to high-fidelity screens, reviewed with the client along the way.
Midway through, a new competitor surfaced, so we stepped back and studied the field. We compared five established hotel operations platforms, sat in on live product demos of two of them, read what hotel staff were saying in their app reviews, and set what they did against the client’s first release and a planned second phase.
Where the gaps were
The research turned into a feature plan built on the places the incumbents fell short: keep working when a housekeeper loses signal in a stairwell, escalate a room that has been waiting more than fifteen minutes, stay reliably in sync with the hotel’s property management system, be simpler to set up, give desktop and mobile the same features, deliver notifications faster, and keep training resources and downloads inside the app.
What we handed back
The engagement wrapped in late 2019 with the design complete: the full UI/UX for the first release, plus a second-phase plan grounded in that competitive research. Most of the work in an app like this is knowing exactly where the existing tools fail, and designing for the housekeeper in the hallway rather than the manager at the desk.