The opportunity
Hotel staff waste hours on repetitive tasks that could be automated. As the sole designer at Goki, I had the chance to solve this problem from the ground up. Our goal was simple: create a platform that handles routine hotel operations automatically, giving staff more time to focus on guests.
User needs
Our research with hotel and hostel staff revealed four key requirements:
- Integration: Work with existing property management systems
- Multitasking: Handle multiple operations at once
- Accessibility: Easy to use on phones, tablets, and computers
- Flexibility: Adapt to different property types and workflows
The key insight: staff needed automation to feel natural, not like learning a new complicated system.
My approach
Through user testing sessions, we learned that staff efficiency was everything. Any time spent figuring out the interface was time taken away from helping guests. This shaped our core design principle: maximize staff productivity with minimal learning curve.
Key design decisions
Based on our testing, I made three critical design choices:
- Reliable integrations: Automation had to work perfectly with existing systems, so I designed clear trigger mechanisms for third-party tools
- Mobile-first design: Staff use phones constantly, so the interface needed to work well on small screens with contextual help always available
- Transparent feedback: Users needed to see automation results immediately, so I designed clear status indicators and output displays
I started with wireframes to focus the team on user experience rather than visual details. This helped us refine the core functionality before moving to detailed designs.
Final designs
Once we validated the core experience, I created detailed designs and prototypes. These helped us test the interface with real users and identify usability issues before development.
Development & testing
Once we were confident in the design, we built a fully functional application. The biggest challenge was creating an interface that worked for users with different technical skills and access levels.
I solved this by designing clear, simple interactions that anyone could understand without training. The interface used familiar patterns and clear symbols that made sense to all user types.
The results
The dashboard launch exceeded our expectations and proved automation could help, not hinder, hotel operations:
Business impact:
- 23% increase in sales to new customers
- 15% improvement in customer satisfaction
- 86% of staff found the platform helpful (survey of 175 users)
Real-world validation: One of our most rewarding moments came during COVID-19, when a property manager used our platform to handle guest operations completely remotely. This proved our design could adapt to unexpected situations.
The success established a strong foundation for future automation features and showed that thoughtful design could make complex technology accessible to everyone.