GuestReady is one of the largest property management companies in Europe with more than 2 thousand properties across the UK, France, Portugal, United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
GuestReady Admin is the property management software developed and continuously improved by the in-house product team.
From UX nightmare to an actually pretty decent product
In 2019 GuestReady acquired another company that spent around 3 years building their own property management software. They had a small team of skilled back end developers, but they didn’t have any designers or front end developers on the team. As you can imagine, the software was packed with useful features, but it was also one big UX nightmare.
The company decided to switch to the new product, and my task was to improve the usability, make the product responsive and improve the overall user experience.
The process
We started by identifying which parts of the product are used the most to help us prioritise. There was some urgency so we jumped immediately to redesigning and implementing the most used pages – Reservation and Property page while in parallel we worked on improving the overall UI, focusing on usability, accessibility and coherency.
Objectives:
- Bring the UI closer to GuestReady brand
- Improve usability and accessibility
- Create a design system that reinforces the brand
GuestReady brand colours were not the best for UI work because of the low contrast ratio, so we decided to adapt them a bit in order to make the interface accessible by AA standards while keeping it coherent with the brand.
Once we had the new colours and the main elements in place we could apply them to the whole product.
Results
We worked closely with our users to redesign the navigation and main pages. In addition to the design work, I worked on the CSS for the new UI in collaboration with our front end developer Andrea Crawford.
Some of the pages after the redesign:
