OYO OS - The backbone of OYO Hotel's Management
OYO OS facilitates a Hotel Manager to manage check-in, checkout, room prices, and property performance. He can also check his total earned incentive in real-time. Currently, OYO OS is live in more than 25 countries. We have 20k active users on OYO OS all over the world.
My Role
I am part of the HMS design team. I designed the OYO OS from scratch with the product manager and business team. I am responsible for the Quality, Creativity, and Delivery of the HMS projects as they are in shape today on all platforms.
Understand the Challenge
Why did we need to design the desktop version?
We were using mobile and tablet versions for the Indian market and it's working very well. But launching tablet and mobile devices for the International market was very difficult due to a lot of cost involved in it and every property has its own desktop and they are using desktop software to manage the complete hotel. So it was very difficult to convince any property owner to switch desktop to tablet.
International markets are the only reason behind the desktop version.
let’s dig deeper….
Research & Analysis
Step 1: User Persona
Going further through the research, I identified 4 personas that have different needs and different goals.
Step 2: Learnings Hotel Manager Day to Day work life
In a hotel, the basic job hours for a hotel manager (HM) is 8 Hours. According to this, there will be 3 shifts in a hotel. So there will be different tasks for every hotel manager.
Step 3: User Reviews & Interviews
I reached out good hints from user reviews which have not highlighted relevant issues about usability or functionalities. I’ve categorized the complaints into 4 categories:
Age Demographics
Step 4: Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis was very difficult for the B2B product because that time we did not have insights of current prodcuts.
I wanted to begin my analysis by looking at direct and indirect competitors of OYOOS, specifically cloudbeds, ezee, and MEWS.
I chose these companies because their products each had different motives and points of view, while still being in the same general category. and they have lots of features.
Inside and Challenges
The main problems we wanted to solve were:
✅ Idea is to make our designs effortless and with fewer clicks that can be used by any single user.
✅ Role-based feature access.
✅ In the international markets, a large number of hotels already using different types of software to manage hotels and we want to switch them into our software.
✅ To keep scalability in mind for every country.
✅ To design a platform for multiple languages.
✅ We also want to sell our HMS software to big channels to manage their hotels through OYO OS.
I came up with a set of design principles to follow the rules of Adaptiveness, Simple, Intuitive, and Smart.
Information Architecture
A well-designed, user-friendly information architecture ensures that users spend less time and effort searching for information and are successful in finding what they need.
Design System
The need for a Design System goes hand in hand with the need for scale, efficiency, and consistency in Design.
Home Page- Dashboard
This is the OYO OS Dashboard where HM can see Today's check-in, checkout, Price, Hotel Occupancy, and property Performance. He can also see his incentive and training-related programs.
Create Booking
Booking Listing View
Auto Room Allocation
This requirement comes to the US and UK markets. Room allocation is one of the most complex and important tasks for hotel managers. They want to manage the next 7 days bookings in one view.
Booking Details
Launch
The First design flow with the basic feature was delivered within 4 weeks to the developers. It took around 3 months to get it developed and live on the web.
Final Design link https://invis.io/VYZT5U4T4U9
The team behind….
Business Head - Rahul Sahni
Engineering Manager - Aditya Pratap Singh
Product Manager - Anuj Lakhotia, Rohit Goel
Product Designer - Nitin Bundele (me)
Test & Iterate
An amazing user experience can only be provided by an iterative design process. All major stakeholders in the company contribute to the process by performing their tasks and duties. This is the only way to attract new users in this competitive world.
What I learned
I tried and understood the vision of the stockholders and turned it into a reality, based on the requirements and goals they had for the product. It required much more collaboration, discussion, and iteration during the design process.
And still, we are working on features that will help 🏨 owners to manage their hotels and will also help OYO in the long term. We design more than 50 features for OYO OS. These features are live in different countries based on different requirement.
