Reinvent hotel digital experience at scale

Duration: Aug 2020 - Nov 2020 | Role: Lead designer, Interaction designer, User research

With 100 million users and growing, Huazhu is building its hotel empire in China. Despite being the digital first-mover, its app has stumbled by the complex legacy and indifferent offerings. It is time to reinvent itself to sustain in the competitive market.

Background

As the 2nd largest hotel chain in China, Huazhu has over 3000 hotels and 500,000 rooms in the country alone. The mobile app, which is the major marketplace for all its core business - hotel sales, membership program, e-commerce, and more, faces server challenges from OTAs and other competitors for their cheaper pricing and good user experiences. On the other hand, Huazhu is a data-driven company, with a strong focus on conversion rate, the experience design has less consideration on users’ needs and behaviors. The leadership team came to us with one ask:

How might we reinvent the app to be differentiated and true to the company’s brand and consumers’ needs?

The old version of the Huazhu hotel app that used by 100 million users

Final Outcome

After 7 weeks of close collaboration, we reconstructed the app’s content structure, identified a set of key features, and create a new visual system that captured Huazhu's brand image. The new app blends online and offline services, providing an affordable, personalized experience to meet the business and recreation needs of Chinese customers.

Experience Design

A Scalable Robust Design System

With its diverse offering, hotel brand, and business units, the app needs a robust design system to grow in scale. So, once the key experience is in place, we audited all the common components, aligned them with the new visual identity, and turn them into a set of UX guidelines and a UI library. The deliverable enabled the in-house UX team to work in parallel on other app parts with high consistency and efficiency.

A snapshot of the design system

Process

Using Design to Help Cross-functional Team Align

We worked closely with the Huazhu team from day one. Together, we analyzed the performance of the app and its competitors. We conducted interviews and co-creation sessions to understand our target user while staying at different hotels to experience the user journey.

Through rapid prototyping and iteration, we facilitated tangible discussion among the leadership, helping them distill what truly matters to the product and brand. We then prioritized the core features and craft a unique design system to help the Huazhu team bring the new product to life.

App Data Analysis

Bridging the gaps between silos

Since the redesign will impact different business units, we kicked off the project by conducting internal interviews with leaders from the brand, product, UX, marketing, service to understand their needs and interests.

We broke down the app's major features and analyzed the data of past redesign to learn what has been tried and how they perform. These efforts help us to gathered consensus quickly and highlighted key areas for the design to focus on.

Key areas to focus on

User Research

Balance users’ desirability and business needs

We start our research by interviewing business travelers, which cover 60% of the app's traffic. We used low-fidelity prototypes and co-creation exercises to probe their needs and journey. We then stayed in various Huazhu hotels to learn how the online and offline service feels from the user's perspective. In the meantime, we reached out to experts who have rich experience in hotel membership and services to draw inspiration from their wide exposure and edge use cases.

Key learnings

Design and Iteration

Reconstruct The App Content Structure

We reconstruct the app content structure, from re-organizing and re-prioritizing the information on the main pages, to redesigning the key flows to be more user-centered.

Example: flow for scenario based service

Example: reconstruct the membership page content structure

Design and Iteration

Identify the core offering through rapid prototyping

With the rich insight, we are ready to get the design running. We first divided the app into four independent experience modules - first entry, search, service, membership, and tackle them separately. We built quick prototypes and checked in with clients daily, raised healthy tension between different functional teams to decide what matters to their business and brand. With runs of prioritization, a core feature set has emerged that fits both Huazhu’s strengths and the user’s needs.