THE PROBLEM

In the early stages of COVID-19 crisis, the hospitality industry in South Africa had little to no digital tools available to meet the growing need for a contactless, GDPR/POPI compliant guest data & health screening management and check-in software.

Discover

The market research was conducted by our supporting marketing company, BiggestLeaf Travel, before I was brought onto the team. The BiggestLeaf team conducted:

• telephonic interviews with our existing clients in hospitality/tourism


• as well as competitor analysis of the South African market.

Explore

At the time our biggest competitors in digitally signed forms were Google Forms and 1tick.co.za.

While both of these competitors provided comprehensive solutions to indemnity and health screening forms, neither provided a one-stop service for digital signatures, check-in management and storing guest data.

DEFINING THE PROBLEM

My company, Handy Cats, has strong client ties to tourism and hospitality in Southern Africa through our WordPress services and in-house bookings management WordPress plugin.

The strategy was to expand on our in-house product line to help meet the needs of our already existing client base by developing Check-In Buddy, and having API integration for our own booking management service and other major providers.

Develop

From the beginning we knew we wanted to develop an all rounded, automated solution for hospitality and tourism. One that integrates into an already existing booking management service, and then automatically sends guests branded emails to check-in, sign and upload important documents as well as complete the COVID-19 health screening questionnaire.

All while providing customizable forms and POPI/GDPR compliant guest data management to the clients using the product.

Test

In the early stages, we iterated quickly through what the minimal viable product would encompass.

Due to the time sensitive nature of the COVID crisis, time to development and market took priority. As one section/feature of the product’s design was signed off on, the developers would start developing while I continued prototyping the adjacent screens/flows.

Listen

As the full scope of the project and its development challenges came into view, we made the decision to strip non-essential features from the MVP and streamline the overall product.

• Initially the Guests had their own login section to have access to their data and uploaded documents, but after further user interviews we concluded that forcing guests to sign in would only complicate the process more and we’d see a higher drop off rate.


• To speed up development, the CSS framework Tailwinds was incorporated into the project at the end of the first quarter. This changed inherit styling of base components from the initial prototype.

Deliver

Once the foundation for the project was laid out – I took a more active role Project Managing and seeing each feature section to production. Given our company structure we took a hybrid agile, waterfall approach to the development of this project. At times we had to extend our timeline to accommodate the needs of other projects or clients.

I oversaw all the feature branch deployments, coordinated with developers, conducted usability testing, on-boarded beta testers, and set up analytics and recordings to monitor user behavior and continuously analyses the product for areas of improvements.