Hotel Room Programming

Luxury Hotel Programming reimagined
MacBook mockup
Product Overview
myRoomXC is Lutron's new cloud-based software designed for Hotel Technology Integrator's (HTI). With older technology, myRoom, programming hotel rooms in luxury spaces was a time consuming and onerous process. The goal of this project was to simplify the HTI commissioning process. As a result, myRoomXC embodies a simplified interface with key information provided at a high level and utilizes distinct spaces for key user tasks.

My Role

Senior UX / UI Designer

Timeline

Fall 2022 - Fall 2024
Dashboard mockup

Problem Statement

The myRoom software previously kept all rooms and templates in one database, creating a huge file that led to slow loading times and frequent crashes.

There were steep learning curves, and a reliance on workarounds for basic tasks. Additionally, HTI’s expressed a dissatisfaction with overly complicated offline workflows. By designing a cloud-based micro front end that separated the rooms and templates, this reduced loading time during the commissioning process and simplified integral steps in the HTI’s workflow.
Dashboard mockup
The Goal

Simplify and speed up an outdated experience

The myRoom software was painfully slow and prone to crashing.
There were steep learning curves, and a reliance on workarounds for basic tasks. Additionally, HTI’s expressed a dissatisfaction with overly complicated offline workflows.By designing a cloud-based micro front end that separated the rooms and templates, this reduced loading time during the commissioning process and simplified integral steps in the HTI’s workflow.

"It gets messy when all skeletons [templates] are viewable in the designs and realize you have made changes to the wrong skeleton, not the template you wanted to make changes to"

HTI
Hotel Technology Integrator
Solution
myRoom is being moved to a new platform with extended cloud-based capabilities. This transition required the team to re-design part of the software. We used this opportunity to design myRoomXC, a faster and more intuitive tool for HTIs.  

Jobs To Be Done

Key Takeaways

After interviewing our Users, we identified some key Jobs to be Done. This helped to better understand what parts of the process are most impactful to the user and where the current software falls short.

Transferring Programming

Ability to transfer template programming to more than one room at a time

Programming the rooms

Faster and simpler room creation and modification

Building and reviewing the model room

Quickly create multiple room templates without software lags
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Journey Map

Based on our findings, we identified three stages where myRoomXC could improve the user experience - Room Programming, Transferring Programming and Repeating the process for all rooms.
It was clear that a lot of the tasks were quite repetitive, and the same process needed to be done for each room in a hotel. Additionally, we realized that there were two separate parts of the commissioning process within the software - creating templates for room types and creating rooms for those templates.
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Separation of Tasks
Based on the distinct workflows and the laggy nature of myRoom, we split each room and template into it's own database. Previously, all rooms and templates were in the same database and switching between rooms, floors and templates was all done in the side panel.
By creating a dedicated page for rooms and one for templates, this helps to reduce load times and cognitive overload for the user.
Room navigator page

Rooms

The updated rooms page separates each room into it's own database, allowing the user to focus on one room at a time and separate the tasks of creating a template and commissioning a room
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Templates

The templates page separates each template into it’s own database and allows user to ‘favorite’ templates and sort by name or date.
User Test

Based on our preliminary research, we designed a user test consisting of interviews, prototypes and an A / B test.

Early iteration of bulk actions

User Goals

Work offline
Multi User
Reduce time waiting
Bulk actions
Offline mode

Business Goals

Reduce time waiting
Improve User’s ability to work independently
Improve cloud capabilities
Add new template

Features

Template creation and assignment
Multi-room transfer
Room health status
Room organization
Multi-room creation
Early iteration of room nav

User Tasks

Template creation, modification and deletion
Home page variants
Area Tree creation and modification
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User Testing Insights

Features and flows aligned with user requirements:

Template creation and modification
Bulk room creation and modification
Room setup using spreadsheets
Setting up the area tree

Features and flows not aligned with user requirements:

Using spreadsheets for anything other than initial upload
Bulk edits (room reordering, edits and deletion)
Area tree edits

User Feedback

"I would like to be able to see all templates in one screen."
- HTI 1
"Might be helpful to see how many devices need to be activated after changing room template."
- HTI 4
"If I know I have some rooms which would be needing another template which I haven't gotten to creating, it would be helpful to be able to mark that as undefined."
- HTI 3
"I like having the green GUI within the room, the software often switches the template so it get's confusing which template you're editing in"
- HTI 7

Reworking Designs

Based on the results of our first round of User Testing, we gained clarity on what features to prioritize, and what an ideal workflow for the User's may look like. With this knowledge, we chose to completely separate the template and room workflows, having a tab for each.  Additionally, we learned that many of our User’s create secondary templates based off the “Control Room” template, so we designed a flow that allows them to quickly duplicate a template. Certain bulk actions like creating rooms and transferring programming to multiple rooms at once would save the user a lot of time during the commissioning phase, so we also prioritized these features and began designing flows to achieve this.