mobile application
project book
contents potential 3 models 5 reflection 9 content map 12 workflows 14 wireframes 16 prototype 20
potential I worked a few odd jobs in college. For a week I worked as a maid.
It was the summer before my last year of college and I had a month to kill before classes started back up. It was a rough week. Quite the experience, one that I recorded and when it came time to pick a senior project, I thought back on my time working in housekeeping. I pinpointed three user groups: Maids I struggled with time management. I wasn’t able to clean the rooms quick enough, it was more than a lack of experience I felt.
Front Desk/Management There was lack of timely communication between the front desk and the maids, about what rooms were booked, needed to be cleaned first; who had extended their stay, or vacating or had requested additional items.
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Laundry was at the heart of many of my problems too. Aside from and also because laundry personnel were short-staffed, it would have helped for certain items to be prioritized.
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Laundry
context I conducted... Contextual research to refresh my memory and pick up on user problems I may have missed for management and laundry staff, since most of my time was spent as a maid. I shadowed A housekeeper at another hotel chain. To see the differences in her approach and to observe how someone with years of experience went about their job in comparison to my one week on the job. I interviewed The manager on staff, to understand her day-to-day duties, struggles, problems and all she did behind the scenes. I saw That their hotel also was under-staffed when it came to laundry staff. They didn’t come in every day or someone would call out and so the maids were low on linen throughout the day. Very similar to my experience.
flow model “Maid: Because I only have seven rooms today I decided to strip the rooms as I go. Normally I would go throughout all of the rooms and remove the dirty linen and then get it to the laundry room.” “Housekeeping Manager: We calculate how many rooms they have to clean and multiply that by 23 minutes and it tells us what time they should be finished with all the rooms.”
sequence model Represents the steps by which a task is completed. Making note of the things that trigger a set of steps and that which the user intends to accomplish in each group of steps.
“Maid: We get twenty-three minutes to clean rooms. If we finish early then we go back and check to see who is off and if there are anymore rooms we can clean.�
Linen inventory towels kings/double pillowcase body towel hand towel wash cloth floor rug
Maid’s needs dirty laundry turn around time demand
maid Smoking/Non linen
front desk Cart Inventory low resources
Clean Linen
Extended Stay
laundry other maids notification
Track # of days
Room Priority dirty/reserved
Room Inventory needed/not
Time speed overtime hours
Vacancies clean/not room inventory
Clean/Non progress
Inventory tolietries linen
Progress maids laundry staff
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laundry
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affinity
artifact
“That is used to seperate the towels from the linens, it helps Kim wash the laundry faster so she doesn’t have to seperate them.”
problems . Time consuming . Unnecessary repetitiveness . Lack of information synchronization between team members
. Making multiple trips to get goods, linen, etc
. The status of a room
changing and the maid not being promptly notified
. Guests previously
requesting more items with the front-desk than the maid had stocked the room with
. Tracking room assignments and if they’re cleaning, occupied, etc
. Stocking-up their cart with
and linen intend for another, not getting laundry down in time for timely cleaning
. The turn around time for clean linen
. Customers who don’t want to be bothered when it is time to clean
. Taking too long to clean a room
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. Co-workers taking supplies
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as much as they can vs approximating what they really need
solutions
Create an application for a variety of devices that notify the maid of the information they need to clean and restor the rooms. Be able to record the amounts of what they need approxiametly for the day/each room Have customers alert cart/maid of what they need/have requested
focus
Allow laundry staff to keep track of who has what, needs what and when they need it. Allow maids and laundry staff to maintain/view cart inventory Allow maids and front desk staff to see what rooms are vacant/stays/ check-outs/clean/not-clean.
The focus on the mobile application is to improve the productivity of hotel housekeepers, management, laundry and supportive staff and guests.
“With more time, I think this ecosystem can be extended into other areas of the hotel. The use of RFID tags, for example to keep track of linen and inventory, can be used beyond the efforts of increasing the efficency in which maids clean hotel rooms.�
content
13 01
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restock workflow
workflows
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housekeeper workflow
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room priority workflow
wireframes
first iteration
wireframes I used a gray-scale to create the wireframes in Adobe Illustrator. Each screen was then exported and imported into inVision app for testing. The second iteration of focused on the interactions of the user interface in worst-case scenarios, like forgotten passwords and mistyped login credentials.
iteration two - login
dashboard
restock list alerts
Floor
Priority
view rooms by floor
view rooms by priority menu breakdown
prototype I also decided to change the menu at the top and bottom. All things that can be interacted with would be located at the top and feedback and status of their workload located at the bottom.
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