Helping spas manage appointments
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Organization
PAR Springer-Miller Systems
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My role
Design Lead
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XFN Team size
5
Springer-Miller Systems had built ATRIO Spa, a tablet-first hospitality booking system, with the goal of supporting spa receptionists and managers to provide exceptional service to their clients. After being on the market for close to two years, the product only had lukewarm interest.
Challenge
The company wanted to relaunch the products in 6 months with an improved experience and a revised feature set. By the time I joined the team, the product team had collated a wealth of data - feature requests, information from support tickets, analysis of competitor offerings in this space, and more - in efforts to try to identify what the core issues and gaps were. However, they weren't resourced to make meaningful changes in a relatively short amount of time with a small team which comprised 2 developers, 1 product manager (PM), 1 business analyst (BA), and - with my addition - 1 designer.
It doesn't make life easy enough to justify ditching the old booking system.
Spa Manager at Customer Spa
Schedule screen from ATRIO Spa's first release
Process
The process involved an extensive review and synthesis of the data the team had collected, accompanied by additional research to dig a bit deeper where necessary. This led us to insights about low-effort high-value problems as well as a prioritized list of issues that the team could address. Our approach involved the following iterative stages:
Strategy
To augment and provide more context for the top opportunities identified from the existing data, we had conversations with customers to understand their needs.
Design
An information architecture map, detailed user flows, and low and high fidelity wireframes were created and iterated upon as we refined the design of the application.
Validation
We held usability testing and A/B testing sessions with customers and target users on a weekly basis to get feedback quickly and keep moving forward.
Solution
The home screen of the application was completely reimagined to focus on guests that would be arriving at or exiting the facility. The aim of the updated experience was to support front desk staff in offering a personalized experience to guests as they checked-in and checked-out.
ATRIO Spa's new home screen
The navigation of the application was revamped to be more consistent and the schedule view was updated to use color-coding in a more intuitive (but still accessible) way.
Redesigned schedule view with legend at bottom
Additionally, the product was extended to include a mobile experience for service providers which initially offered a schedule viewer with future plans to include built-in messaging and schedule manager.
Early low-fidelity wireframes for the mobile experience geared towards service providers
Outcome
We built a demo version of the application and tested end-to-end flows of the three main tasks with 13 users across 8 different spas. Feedback was collected via the system usability scale (SUS) questionnaire which resulted in an average score of 87 points ("Excellent" range; source).
The demo was also shown to hundreds of hospitality professionals during a 2-day industry conference in Las Vegas and garnered a lot of interest with over 50 new sign-ups for the soon-to-launch beta program.
Business Value
The redesign of ATRIO Spa was a learning experience for the product team and company on what the good data and close partnerships with customers could produce, even in a very short amount of time.
Customers that we had worked closely with to build the demo version were impressed with how we turned around the product and volunteered to collaborate on future versions for ATRIO Spa as well as other hospitality products.
How I Led
Given the aggressive schedule and ambitious goals, our small but mighty team functioned like a start-up as we worked closely to create a compelling product that hospitality customers would find uniquely valuable. We all wore multiple hats; for instance, the BA and I ran usability tests in parallel with different customers, the devs co-led weekly planning activities, and I provided them with snippets of HTML, CSS, and XAML code to accelerate front-end efforts whenever possible. This meant that I had to give my teammates a crash course on UX fundamentals and user research while leading a big redesign of a niche application.
On more than a few occasions, I also had to push back on design and product scope creep from the PM and check my own enthusiasm to explore the design of a cool idea. With our heads down, the team was firing on all cylinders, while the research that had been conducted early on kept us on track to deliver a unique and truly guest-centered product.
Point of Sale (POS) design for ATRIO Spa
