Since our research group consists five students of equal standing, we've all taken on equal roles with research, brainstorming, and contributing to the work. With that in mind, we each have our own strength that we lean into. Maia is great at planning, Irene is good and handing emails from our client, etc. I am the only one in the group whose native language is English, so I handle a lot of the communication and proofreading for our work.
Since this research project is part of the senior capstone course, both fall and winter semesters were dedicated to the project. This allowed us the opportunity to dive deeper into the project, which meant planning ahead was paramount to the success of the project
Fall Semester (Aug-Dec): Research plan and creating materials
Winter Semester (Jan-Apr): Research, Design, Delivery
The hotel-facing side of the KeyShare platform, used by administrators, managers, and staff, currently presents challenges due to its complex interface and the wide range of options available. These difficulties affect tasks such as managing guest check-ins, mobile keys, and staff permissions, but the exact nature of the problems faced by different user groups is still unclear.
Our research goals:
Our research approach combined heuristic evaluation and usability testing to gather both expert insights and direct user feedback. We began with heuristic evaluations, where five UX experts independently analyzed the KeyShare interface using Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics. This method was chosen to efficiently identify potential usability issues before involving users, allowing us to create a more focused usability testing plan.
Stakeholders were actively involved in the research process, supporting our usability testing by providing gift card incentives for participants. We conducted six one-hour usability testing sessions, which complemented our expert evaluations. This dual-method approach proved effective: heuristic evaluation helped us identify potential issues systematically, while usability testing validated these findings and uncovered additional user-specific challenges that experts might have missed. The combination of methods allowed us to gather both qualitative insights about user behavior and quantitative data about issue severity, creating a solid foundation for our design recommendations.
We recruited participants through LinkedIn, using a targeted approach to ensure a diverse and relevant participant pool. Our key criteria included seeking individuals both with and without hospitality industry experience – ultimately recruiting three participants with prior hospitality experience and three without. This balanced mix was intentional, as it allowed us to evaluate the platform's usability from multiple perspectives, particularly important given that hotels regularly onboard new staff with varying levels of industry exposure.
Some of the questions asked during the usability testing:
During our synthesis phase, we methodically processed the data gathered from our six one-hour usability testing sessions and five heuristic evaluations. We employed affinity diagramming to systematically organize our qualitative findings, clustering user insights by specific tasks and further categorizing them into user quotes, observed actions, and expressed emotions. This structured analysis approach revealed clear patterns in user behavior, enabling us to distill compelling insights that would drive our design recommendations. By triangulating data across both our expert evaluations and user testing sessions, we were able to identify the most critical usability issues and prioritize them based on both frequency and severity.
Currently our team is in the process of revising the data visualizations and UX artifacts from our research report. Once that's done I can share some of the insights and data that came from all of our research. It's incredibly exciting stuff, this project has certainly made me fall in love with the user research process. Thanks for checking this out, come back soon for updates.
