Foundational User Research Case Study

About Fabhotels

FabHotels is a network of 3 star budget hotels in India, It currently operates in more than 40+ cities of India with 450+ Hotels, including major cities like Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Indore, and Coimbatore. Their operation is along the lines of global brands like Ibis or China's Home Inns ​and China Lodging. They share the aim to provide standardized services at economical budgets.

My Role

I was the lead UX designer. Managing a team of 3 UX folks and mentoring them for user research. I was also laying out the groundwork for user-centric design process by doing regular user interviews, analytics, creating personas, leading up to task models and customer journey. Have also been responsible for creating the design system for the brand and approaching design from a scalability point of view.

Objective

The biggest factor was to document all the current problems into the product roadmap. However, before we can get to that we needed to define what problems are understand industry standard beyond just one competitor. More importantly, no qualitative or quantitative methods of research were being used for customer facing products. That translated into vague design tasks with no impact on larger picture.

We started with understanding what the customers are concerned about the most - So I raided their call center, which employees about 100 people. We went ahead and started interviewing them, with a fixed questionnaire, focussing on the nature and volume of queries. We also interviewed them in different shifts to capture maximum queries depending upon time. For example, most check-in/out happened in the morning, so does their queries, and in the evening queries were more about booking and missing amenities (general problems) . After interviewing about 30 people from the staff the answers started repeating themselves. After that, we stopped and moved on to Usability testing with the customers

Next, we used our Mweb site for Guerrilla usability testing to quickly validate the above data. Eventually we gathered subjects in a controlled environment. We gave them a user objective complete with a scenario, recorded their activities and also noted down their concerns/pain points/delight points. We also had stakeholder interviews from CEO to CMO and other key people in the organization. This was done to understand what market segment is the organization trying to target. After understanding this we started interviewing that market segment in form of user interviews, i wasn't particularly looking for the users who have used our product but people we intend to target through our marketing. We used existing users for usability testing.

After completing above tasks we created this into one flow where customers needs could be transferred into product solutions.

And currently the product team is going through all the suggestions/hypothesis one by one to implement in the live product and see if has any bearing via analytics. So far the result has been very promising. Below are the findings in the previous user flow.

Competitive Analysis - Feature wise

While we started working on the qualitative data above based on our user flow/system journey. We wanted to dig deeper and enhance the new features that came along the way and compare it with whats already out there. This helped us compare our product on industry level.

User Research Findings

During our user research and usability testing sessions, our user pool went up to 150+ interviews. Our final aim was to test our current design in real world and validate our quantitative data received from analytics. Also to involve stakeholders we invited them to user interviews sessions, and started recording conversations for documentation purposes. As an accesible deliverable to share with everyone involved, we chose to map our customer journey through this data. We got this analysis by three data points -

Personas

Derived from the user interviews conducted by the team.

Customer Journey

One of the points that we were certain about while starting to create this journey we didn’t wanted to stop it at “Booking done”. Our research findings were holistic to craft the entire experience. Right from the need of staying at the hotel to the checking out. We used Myro as our digital tool because we wanted real time updating across all stakeholders and designers. Here is a glimple of the journey. Our intent was to design not on the basis of user flow because our mental model does not follow the typical system journey we design. We wanted to start with the “need” and “pain points”. And end till till the customer is actually in the experience and not till he stopped using the “app”. Please click below on the image to study it in detail.

Proposed Solutions

The proposed solutions were keeping in mind the budget and feasibility of the product. We worked around our backlog to add these features in our product roadmap keeping in mind the business objectives and user needs. The implementation of the entire system was slow by design so as not to rattle the existing users. Here is a small glimpse, but to read through it in detail. Please go to - Customer journey mapping - Click here

Conclusion

The customer journey helped the entire team to be on same page. And helped us solving a lot of navigational problems. Even our small changes, once they were in product roadmap, helped us in having a better conversion rate. Our engagement levels were all time high and we also managed to get consistency in our entire design language. Our performance test availed a better response time and customers had an industry standard app/mweb in their hand.