Equity Estates
Building enterprise software for a destination club fund's complex offline business.
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Building enterprise software for a destination club fund's complex offline business.
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With over 60+ luxury residences across 35 destinations around the globe in their portfolio, Equity Estates Fund™ was looking for a way to continue to grow their portfolio of $2-$5 million dollar high-end properties while also providing memorable experiences to their customers (also known as “investors”).
Their investors’ initial capital contribution is between $257,500 - $692,500 and they expect their entire experience to be smooth, unique, and seamless. With these expectations, Equity Estates needed a robust reservation system to effectively manage availability of properties, provide a seamless booking experience, and help investors easily understand their membership details.
I was responsible for the experience strategy, user research, and design of the Destination Club Manager (“DCM”) enterprise software. I led the UX work, producing deliverables and presenting these to the client. Additionally, I led efforts to address pain-points related to the booking and membership managing experiences. I worked alongside two full-stack developers and copywriters to execute this project.
Their previous system was spread out across different platforms in which they used email folders, Excel spreadsheets, and other unreliable systems. This negatively impacted the investors’ trust because the concierge team frequently encountered inaccuracies when booking a reservation and keeping track of their membership’s balance. In addition, the concierge and sales teams spent a substantial amount of time to remedy situations caused from overlapping reservations and inaccurate membership balance sheets, which lead to loss of revenue.
Our challenge was to create custom software that addressed booking inaccuracies and issues with managing memberships, which, in turn, allowed the concierge and sales teams to enhance the user experience for their diverse group of investors. Destination clubs are a complex business model that require both service design and product design - this in turn ensured that the tools were usable, scalable, and accurate.
Querying databases, displaying residence photos, pulling up search results quickly, adding custom events - all of these factors turn out to be considerations that affect the end-user experience, since slowness in any part of the process results in poor usability.
I conducted a competitive analysis among a mix of rental and equity destination clubs - Ritz-Carlton Destination Club, JetSetter, The Hideaways Club, and Exclusive Resorts - to explore their booking systems and user flows for creating and canceling bookings.
After thorough analysis, I discovered that although they incorporated a visual calendar component for booking reservations, the functionality required an excess of tooltips to explain which steps to take next as these weren’t clearly indicated. In addition, these calendars took a step-by-step wizard approach, which made it difficult to undo any actions a user has already performed.
In order to best understand the business goals and their end-users needs, I worked with my team of developers to conduct a task analysis (see below) of the clients’ process, spreadsheets, reports, emails, and conducted contextual inquiries to understand the internal teams' day-to-day tasks and communication with their investors.
We also conducted user interviews with investors, concierge team, sales team, and executives. The main objectives were to understand the following:
Previously, the concierge and sales teams were managing property schedules and each membership's account statements with Excel spreadsheets. They had to share Excel spreadsheets through email and hard copies, resulting in untold wasted hours and human error that resulted in double bookings and miscalculated account balances. This led to inaccuracies with their booking process, which negatively impacted their ability to provide highly personalized services for their investors.
Their investors include a diverse group of business owners, senior executives, doctors, lawyers, and other busy professionals. There are empty nesters, singles, and plenty of families. Each user expressed different levels of expectations and trust when it came to booking their vacations and managing their memberships. External users (investors) experienced issues with the unsystematic booking process.
The research surfaced many important opportunities and constraints for the work that followed, as well as two clear design principles that would guide our project: efficiency and transparency.
To appeal to this wide variety of users, I had to ensure that their booking calendar and member dashboards were familiar, transparent about important information and activity, and compatible with multiple platforms.
I immediately began working on the scope of work requirements for the minimum viable product. Afterwards, I created a technology roadmap that balanced customer goals and business goals that prioritized features for launch and beyond. The stakeholders were continuously interviewed before each sign-off milestone.
It was important to invest time into making sense of workflows and existing processes. This involved task analysis and it uncovered the many different touchpoints that each user takes to achieve their intended goals.
Our research revealed different archetypes, which we used to discuss with our client to develop a clear picture of who the design of the software would target in phase 1 and subsequent phases in future releases. To communicate pain points with the current process and prioritize functionality based on user needs, I created two primary user personas and a customer journey map. This was key in setting client expectations about who we were designing for.
We used experience mapping to visualize and communicate the external users' end-to-end experience with the current process.
After affinitizing an abundance of user research and feedback, we came away with a range of different opinions and suggestions about how the enterprise software should function. Managing feedback presented a challenge as it came from 2 distinct user groups, each with a variety of differing viewpoints.
Synthesizing the research into prioritized goals gave us a unique perspective for considering both what the software should do and also how it should feel to deliver a great experience.
In order to fully understand many of the complex processes involved in choosing and booking a vacation, I mapped workflows on paper. This helped me understand the touchpoint where our software could help decrease some of the pain users experienced as well as emphasize opportunities where we could try to innovate.
Before wireframing, I sketched my designs to create paper prototypes. These were used to evaluate the designs with our users, which provided a way to quickly gather valuable feedback and integrate user considerations into a minimum viable product. I then created digital wireframes from the sketches that incorporated more detailed content.
With the time constraints in mind for a fast turnaround, I quickly designed detailed mockups in Photoshop while adhering to their style guide and brand. While this was beneficial in showing our stakeholders the design process, it turned out to be a less efficient process. In retrospect, using Samantha Warren’s Style Tiles method would have been less time consuming and allowed for faster iterations with the client.
I worked closely with the development team to bring the designs to life as a working prototype. Communicating requirements, technical constraints, and capabilities in real-time was an effective way to test constantly and iterate efficiently.
The DCM allows internal and external users to log in to one place, view all of their residences’ availability in real-time, alerts, membership stats, maintenance requests, reports, and other accommodations all in one location.
The system has a number of rules in place to handle reservation availability. This includes management of major holidays (peak nights) and multiple reservation types (confirmed, tentative, and pending).
The DCM is a web-based enterprise software system that provides a unified experience to streamline the booking process and membership management by increasing transparency and accuracy. This solution reduced frustration for both targeted user groups:
The task automation for booking reservations and membership management freed up time for the concierge team to provide their members more personalized services (planning events, weddings, parties, and reunions) and discovering where the best experiences are!
Investors are now able to conveniently and quickly search and create reservations anytime from anywhere. They are empowered to own their vacations and create travel plans without unnecessary downtime.
The Destination Club Manager's streamlined system facilitated a more efficient and clear communication channel between investors and Equity Estates’ internal teams, reducing inaccuracies with booking reservations, such as double bookings, and increasing productivity.
Since these designs have been introduced, Equity Estates has opened two additional funds due to an increase in investor memberships.
Both target user groups enjoyed their rich experience with the reservation system. It provided them an easy-to-use user interface to:
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