The strategic shift
Goki started by serving hostels, but we hit a growth ceiling. The hostel market was too small to sustain our business long-term. After analyzing our options, we decided to expand into the much larger hotel market. This meant redesigning our app to serve a completely different type of customer.
I partnered with our product manager to understand hotel needs through research and weekly stakeholder interviews. Hotels had very different expectations than hostels, and we needed to learn fast.
Key challenges
Hotels presented two major design challenges:
Brand identity: Hotels wanted the app to feel like their own, not a generic third-party tool. I designed a customizable interface that showcased each hotel's branding while maintaining usability standards.
Trust and adoption: Hotels were skeptical of new technology that guests would use. I involved hotel managers in the design process, gathered their feedback regularly, and made sure they felt ownership of the final product.
Design constraints
Two technical limitations shaped my design decisions:
Backward compatibility: The new design had to work for existing hostel customers while appealing to hotels. I created flexible components that could adapt to both markets.
Cross-platform requirements: We were building for iOS, Android, and web with one codebase (React Native). This meant designing within the constraints of what was technically feasible across all platforms.
Testing the concept
I built interactive prototypes to test our hotel-focused design with real users. This helped us validate the new approach and identify usability issues before development.
The key interaction
Door unlocking was the most important feature in the app, so it had to feel delightful. With limited engineering resources and tight deadlines, I used Rive to create an engaging lock animation that worked across all platforms without requiring complex development work.
Launch & iteration
Once we validated the design, we built the full application. We tested extensively with hotel partners for several weeks, incorporating their feedback before the final launch.
The transformation
The hotel-focused redesign completely changed our business:
Revenue impact: Hotels went from 35% to 70% of company revenue in just four months after launch.
Customer feedback: Hotel partners told us they felt like the app was truly theirs. Many stopped considering building their own guest apps because ours met their needs so well.
Strategic validation: The pivot proved that thoughtful design could help us successfully enter new markets while keeping existing customers happy.
This project taught me that understanding your users' deeper motivations - like hotels wanting brand control - is just as important as solving their functional problems.