Background & Challenges

With the continuous prosperity of China's tourism industry and the growing number of middle-class individuals, the mid-to-high-end hotel industry is experiencing vigorous development.
Honeywell has nearly 30 years of successful application experience in the hotel industry, and the hotel room control system is an important product for the hotel and accommodation industry, aimed at enhancing hotel operational efficiency and guest experience. However, there are some market differences between China and the U.S., necessitating a localized product tailored for the Chinese market that is more in line with the habits and preferences of Chinese users.
Therefore, we have planned and implemented a full-link service system from an end-to-end perspective. However, the lack of reference research data and precedents in today's market means that we will be deriving insights from scratch, exploring user needs based on scenarios from configuration and debugging to room usage, and building a user experience service from the ground up.

Final Results

Through on-site research (VOC) in mid-to-high-end hotels and agents in the northern and southern regions of the Chinese market (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai), combined with actual user tracking observations in real work scenarios (OVOC), we refined and extracted the stakeholder map, user personas, and user experience maps for different target roles throughout the entire link.
From this, we identified 50 opportunity points and summarized 3 main issues, which informed our design and innovation to address user problems. Additionally, due to the innovative and practical user experience design, the product design also received the Japan G-Mark Design Award.

Insights & Strategies

Trend Insights

Through our research, we found that the core clients of the hotel room control system face three main issues:

• Agents often lack work experience and specific programming skills.

• The current methods for designing control logic are time-consuming and labor-intensive, presenting significant engineering barriers.

• Maintaining systems based on existing software solutions is not easy.

We also identified two key points as our design objectives:

• Agents have a strong need for design debugging tools that can eliminate technical barriers.

• Agents need to enhance productivity during design and debugging.

Mapping the Full Role User Experience and Stakeholder Map, Identifying Demand Pain Points by Scene

We divided the entire customer process into six major segments: 'Awareness - Purchase - Installation - Use - Maintenance - Upselling', presenting the relationships and scenario interaction maps between different roles in full view.

This map illustrates the relationships between different roles, scenarios, and scene needs, vividly depicting every action in the user process and every touchpoint with which they interact. It provides an index for constructing a full-link user experience service and final design for the room control system.

Design Implementation

Using the 'Card Sorting' method to enable real users to participate in the design, we performed a complete redesign of the information structure, interaction, and layout.

Simplified Check-list Interface for Easy Design and Debugging

Past: Programming & debugging required engineers to have a high technical background.

Present: An intuitive checklist can complete 90% of the programming work, room type design, and functionality association, conveniently handling frequent design changes at the project's initial stage. Users can view real-time scenarios and lighting effects in the room and make quick modifications, reducing debugging time by more than 50%.

Exquisite Details for Easy Installation

Past: Complex wiring environments made it easy to misconnect.

Present: The system automatically generates wiring diagrams, and the control module uses pluggable and colorful terminal designs to correspond to and distinguish different areas by digits and colors. The system's table colors match the terminal interface colors of the controllers, facilitating on-site wiring and significantly reducing wiring errors while increasing installation efficiency.

Worry-free Maintenance Service and Convenient Expansion and Upgrade

Dynamic display of room status and equipment operating conditions, real-time recording of service response times, equipment failures, and other event information, along with statistical and trend analysis of room data, helps hotel owners improve work efficiency and enhance guest satisfaction in the future.

Consistent Design Language

Intuitive design and user-friendly interfaces delight our users and provide a consistent design language for Honeywell's new brand.

GOOD DESIGN AWARD

Due to its innovative and practical design, this product design received the Japan G-Mark Design Award.
The G-Mark Design Award, officially known as the “Good Design Award,” was founded in 1957 and has become one of the globally recognized authoritative awards in the design field due to its stringent review standards and wide-reaching influence.