Simplified CMS to drive B&B owners engagement
Transformed Criton CMS to enable small accommodation owners to easily create their hospitality app.
Problem and hypothesis
The Criton Content Management System (CMS), designed to create hospitality apps, received a small level of engagement from B&B and small accommodation owners. This was mostly due to the financial and time resources needed to build an app in the CMS. From the feedback we gathered, we hypothesised that B&B owners needed a simpler way to design and set up their apps.
Collaboration and my role
I joined as the sole UX designer in an Agile team comprised of 5 developers, a scrum master and a quality assurance engineer. Our stakeholders included the head of engineering and the product director. I was responsible for the overall design direction of the project while collaborating with the stakeholders and customer support on ideation, and working with developers on implementation.
Progress to solution
Our user interviews showed that B&B owners felt overwhelmed by the choice of settings and options in the Criton CMS. They simply wanted “the app to look good”. The vast majority of them did not have a brand they could use to style their app. As a result, we decided to create a simplified CMS, based on Criton, which had pre-set styling and allowed using placeholder content.
Problem-solving solution
We repeated user interviews during concept and release stages, and the new Pip CMS received positive feedback of having only useful settings.
Challenges
During ideation, we explored several options that ultimately didn’t satisfy all actors within the platform ecosystem: B&B owners, their guests, and us as admins. We needed to combine easy access to the app for B&B quests as well as making sure that only permitted guests can see secure information. First concepts included search through all the available properties that raised security concerns with B&B owners.
Outcomes for users and business
B&B owners were able to create their app in the trial time (30 days), and signed up for the new product subscription.
What I learned
Because of this project, we realised the need to review features in the main Criton CMS for our customers with hotels. The initiated user interviews showed the power to persuade stakeholders to change the planned roadmap.