Dashboard for GuestReady hosts where they can see the information about their revenues, occupancy rates and guest satisfaction.
The process
We kicked off the project interviewing internal staff – Account managers, and main users – GuestReady hosts.
Research
Research goal
Get to know different types of GuestReady hosts. Understand what are their main goals and obstacles. Get familiar with different contexts in which they will interact with the GuestReady dashboard.
Research questions
- Who are GuestReady hosts?
- What are their main goals and obstacles?
- How are they currently accomplishing their goals?
- Which functionalities are the most needed to most users (red routes)
- What are the specific contexts where GuestReady Dashboard will be used?
Research Method
Online Questionnaire + User Interviews
Participants
GuestReady hosts, Account managers
Information architecture
The first version was a fairly simple dashboard with 5 main pages plus the profile and payment info sections.
Wireframes
The layout is based on the needs identified through interviews with users from GuestReady’s biggest markets – London and Paris. Research showed that the 2 main concerns of users were the occupancy rate and the monthly net revenues, so we opted for displaying those 2 graphs at the top of the overview page.
Card layout enabled easy implementation for all screen sizes, as the cards stack vertically.
UI elements and Mockups
After we tested the wireframes with users and done some smaller improvements we moved on to the visual design.
The UI elements were organised using Atomic Design principles into Elements, Molecules, Organisms and Pages.
Mockups were created in Sketch app, interactive prototype in InVision, for developer handoff we used the Sketch Measure plugin.
Implementation
The first implementation was done in Ruby on Rails with Bulma CSS framework. After the merge with another company in April 2019 the whole project was redone with Python and Django with Bootstrap CSS framework.
In addition to all the research, testing, UX and UI work, which was my main responsibility, I helped our front-end developers by coding some of the components in CSS for the V2.
Iterations
In further iterations we added more functionality to the calendar, restructured the accounting pages, added the guest reviews.
Calendar
In the new calendar, we introduced a sidebar where the hosts can see the details of all the bookings and cleaning missions, including the information about guests and agents, and synchronise data with other calendar apps. In the additional menu that opens in a modal, they are able to block or unblock the dates for personal stay and change the prices for specific days.
Accounting pages
New accounting pages provide users with the current balance, overview of reservations, detailed earnings and expenses breakdown, and options to download and export the data.
Conclusion
The overall feedback was very positive – the account managers get less questions from hosts so they can focus on other stuff, hosts have easy to use dashboard for overview and accounting of their properties and revenues.
