Powering Contactless Guest Experiences at Scale
UX. Engineering. Product Development.
SpiceFactory works with clients in the hospitality industry to deliver custom-built technology solutions that improve the experience quality across the guest journey.
UX. Engineering. Product Development.
SpiceFactory works with clients in the hospitality industry to deliver custom-built technology solutions that improve the experience quality across the guest journey.
Project Overview
Nomadix Inc. offers technology solutions that enable contactless guest experiences, providing hotel guests with a safe and secure environment and a greater sense of control and convenience.
Nomadix approached us to create mobile and web apps and a corresponding web portal that would allow guests complete control over their stay with little to no contact with the front-desk staff. The mobile app enables easy, 24/7 access to hotel staff, amenities, services and in-room entertainment.
Our Approach
The specific setup of this project demanded tight coordination between SPFR and Nomadix teams and synchronization in feature discovery and development. This is especially important when developing complementary features that need each other to work or when there is a backend-frontend division of labor between teams.
The assembled team needed to reflect the complexity of the project and all product aspects that need to be covered: product dev, designers, UX, mobile and web engineers.
“80% of hotel guests would download a hotel app that would enable them to check in, check out and get all relevant hotel information.”
The User Experience design process
Our process always starts with “the talk”. We talk about the task at hand and aim to uncover any potential problems even at this stage. It is important to us to never lose sight of the big picture even when we are focusing on a smaller, more manuable chunk of work.
The result of all of this talking is a series of sketches and documents that outline what we need to do. Everyone needs to be on the same page before we move on to the wireframing stage.
Wireframing
By the time frames of wire come into the picture, a lot of work had already been done. Sometimes we skip them altogether since the sketches often provide enough information and structure to support the high-fidelity design.
As an essential part of our UX process, sketches ensured that all the solution functionalities worked perfectly
Design
In case of Nomadix, we have established a visual language at the start of the project. Design was a matter of composing the UI with the already established components. High-fidelity design was used to validate the solution before going into the production.
High-fidelity design that is always a product of meticulous sketching and wireframing
Software Architecture
Using React Native for iOS, Android, and the Web we managed to build a product sharing 98% of the code between iOS and Android, and more than 90% between the mobile and Web app. The clean communication layer we’ve built helped us abstract away all the specifics and complexities of the API (GraphQL) with real-time data updates.
Splitting UI into independent, reusable React components, helped us quickly evolve the UX while preserving consistency and staying SOLID. Fast iterations (one-week sprints) helped the product team discover the features that work. This approach delivered a high-quality solution our clients love while cutting down development and maintenance costs.
Guest app
Together with Angie Hospitality’s team (Nomadix subsidiary), we’ve built a guest facing app for iOS, Android and the Web. The app is designed to enable contactless, safe, and streamlined guest-hotel interactions across all key touchpoints during a guest’s stay, including:
Mobile check in (fast and easy, eliminates queuing at the front desk)
Service requests (room service, F&B ordering, drycleaning, etc.)
Booking amenities (everything from SPA treatments to restaurants and activities)
Mobile check out with contactless payment.
Angie app is built for the new normal and beyond, helping both hotels and their guests adapt to the new ways of travel where there’ll be increased demand for more convenience, heightened safety standards, and fast, contactless services via guest’s personal devices.
Management dashboard
The management dashboard is built to enable service management to create and edit amenities and services (hotel restaurant menu and booking, food ordering, room cleanup, spa, etc.), monitor and process guest requests, set roles and permissions for staff, define escalation rules, and manage and track progress of the tasks.
Depending on the setup, the dashboard can display a single or multi property view, including information about departments, roles, guest request items, etc.
62% of consumers expect to increase their use of touchless technologies once the COVID-19 crisis subsides.
Chat and Voice
This technology enables hotel guests to use a chat or voice-to-text conversion interface in order to communicate with the hotel staff and handle their requests and orders.
AI chatbot may be enabled to run in the background and provide instant and automated service and query handling.
Smart Room Controls
This set of features converts guests' mobile phones into multi-device remote control for:
in-room entertainment (casting, TV, music..)
Thermostat and air-conditioning
Blinds and curtains
Lights
The outcome
We’ve built a stable and scalable white-label solution that can be customised to fulfil any hotel brand’s needs. The content management system is flexible and enables users to seamlessly create unique guest experiences.
Let’s discuss how a hospitality solution like this could improve your hotel’s operations, guest satisfaction and your bottom line!