UX ♥ Hospitality
What we can (and should) learn from the experts
“…for it is Zeus who sends to us all beggars and strangers; and a gift, however small, means much when given by a man like me…” ¹
Hospitality has existed since antiquity. More importantly, it’s an industry that measures success against customer’s happiness. This is not dissimilar to user experience. HaTS studies. App Store reviews. We want to know what works for our users so we can design better experiences.
“Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side. Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you.” ²
Understanding the difference between service and hospitality will be crucial in understanding how it relates to user experience design.
Danny Meyer, founder and CEO of the Union Square Hospitality Group, wrote the book on enlightened hospitality. He describes the differences as follows:
“Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes the recipient feel. Service is a monologue — we decide how we want to do things and set our own standards for service. Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on a guest’s side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response. It takes both great service and great hospitality to rise to the top.” ²
It’s important to note that hospitality does not exist in a vacuum. Good user experience can not develop from a one-way conversation: speaking at our users. Service without soul, no matter how elegant or well designed, will quickly be forgotten.
A good user experience, designed correctly and delivered effectively, embodies 6 key aspects that are hallmarks of the hospitality industry: context, storytelling, value, personalization, feedback and assistance.
Context
A good contextual experience is one that doesn’t just embody local culture, but amplifies it and makes it special.
A localized experience doesn’t start and end at translated text. In the service industry, you take into account local tastes and cultures, user behaviors, and the environment in which you’re operating. Imagery and color schemes might change. Grammar and phrasing are tailored to local cadences. Dishes are crafted to please local palettes.
What are the user’s expectations coming in to your experience? What similar experiences have they had in the past? What problem are you trying to solve, and how does that change not just based on your user’s physical location, but also their emotional state?
Even the most immersive experiences rarely happen in isolation.
Contextual UX allows us to adapt in active ways, based on a user’s context and immediate environment, but also in a more passive way, surfacing information when it’s most relevant, by intuiting what a user might need or responding to their cues. It takes time to understand the world around a user, and the technologies we have to better interact with that world in real time.
Once you figure all that out, what might be some or your audience’s special needs?
If you have a retail experience, where is your user in their larger shopping journey?
Context is the right idea at the right time in the right place, delivering the right value.
Storytelling
Connect emotionally to your audience by telling an authentic story.
In the hospitality industry, you can’t micro-manage. You don’t have the luxury of time to make a guest feel good; just a few minutes/seconds. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Instead, you’re helping your guest to craft their own story. Your role is to connect emotionally to maintain interest and loyalty. Your job is to tell a story for the duration of their engagement in order to transport the guest.
What kind of stories will your users tell their friends and family about your app or experience? It’s unlikely that the tale will focus on a button or a transition, but more about how you helped them solve a problem or created a moment of delight. Build a framework for play and exploration even in the most serious of contexts. Be open to being surprised by your users; they are the protagonist in the story you are writing together.
“Shared ownership develops when guests talk about a restaurant as if it’s theirs. They can’t wait to share it with friends, and what they’re really sharing, beyond the culinary experience, is the experience of feeling important and loved.
That sense of affiliation builds trust and a sense of being accepted and appreciated, invariably leading to repeat business, a necessity for any company’s long-term survival.” ²
How can we usher our users through a complete experience, not begin and end just while an app is active?
Value
Emotional luxury is the art of making each user feel important through thoughtful and surprising unique personalized gestures. Users want to feel acknowledged, and little delights add up.
Luxury is having what you’re thinking about presented to you before you voice that desire. ³
Amit Majumder, General Manager of Jumeirah Vittaveli shares the following example:
“[when one] notices that the bathrobe, for example, is a bit too long for the guest, [they] take it down to the seamstress to alter its size, and then discreetly place it back on the bathroom hanger.”
Understand people with different abilities and motivations. Learn how to persuade and inspire them. Make the mundane memorable.
In UX, value is determined by how you solve real problems in people’s lives and help them to attain their goals.
“Every choice meant another needless intrusion by the waitstaff on guests’ time and attention. What mattered most to me was trying to provide maximum value in exchange not just for the guest’s money but also their time.
Anything that unnecessarily disrupts a guest’s time with his or her companions or disrupts the enjoyment of the meal undermines hospitality.” ²
Value varies by content, user and journey.
Even if I’m momentarily annoyed, I should understand that your intentions were good, and meant to solve a problem. What is going to feel valuable to any given user at any given moment? How does that shift over time?
Personalization
Every user entrusts their likes and dislikes with you, and they expect that information to not only be held in confidence, but to be acted upon and used to anticipate future requests. Respect is earned, through discretion and sensitivity, and understanding nuance — cultural, national, religious.
Users value privacy but they don’t want to feel abandoned. Each has their own goals and aspirations; meaning you need to tailor your communication to each customer’s needs. Intuitive and anticipatory service can mean different things to different people.
The top hospitality businesses do homework on their guests & update profiles regularly, often taking advantage of predictive models. Personalization can not be a snapshot. A database of intelligence does not automatically translate to anticipatory experience (consider a trip persona vs. a guest’s everyday behavior). Oftentimes they market to aspirations, which may not be reflective of a fixed profile or past actions.
You want to balance preferences with exposure to new things, and ensure that preferences are genuine and accurate. It is possible to be too personalized!
Genuine relationships form organically; they can not be manufactured. Lasting relationships respect and nurture the individual. How can you continue to surprise and delight?
“If a reservationist has had to work especially hard to calm down or accommodate an irate caller, we may use the notation WFM (‘welcome from manager’), which means the guest may need some extra attention from a manager.
When people let us know that they don’t wish to be interrupted unnecessarily, the notation is ‘do not disturb’ or ‘drop and go’ — that is, deliver the food and leave them alone.” ²
The important thing to note here is that lack of interruption is a user choice, not the absence of a choice.
Feedback
Taking action against individual bad actors is like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon.
Addressing user feedback should be proactive; people expect immediacy. Listen carefully and actively without prejudice, empathize with your user, and offer a solution. This will help turn your critics into an ambassadors. If you don’t listen, you can’t learn.
Translate preferences and user requests into anticipatory offerings. What is the profile of a user who opts out? Are there patterns? What are you learning from users who uninstall your app or leave negative reviews?
Invite dissatisfied guests to participate in expert team. For individuals with issues, it’s often far more important to be heard than to be agreed with.
Address mistakes through awareness, acknowledgement, apology, action, and additional generosity.
“Playing defense, we got better at overcoming our frequent mistakes or at defusing whatever situations guests might be angry about.
We also make sure to enter into ‘customer notes’ any previous mistakes we made. As long as we make it clear that we’re interested in knowing through active listening, most people are delighted to tell us exactly what they want or need.” ²
Feedback opportunities should be front and center, and we should be treating these as the valuable data that they are.
Assistance
Don’t do what a customer can do themselves. Instead, focus on discovery tailored to user interests.
A concierge is a filter, not an arbiter. They focus on two key tasks: curation and validation. When a customer is overwhelmed by all of the conflicting information available online, the concierge is the authentic decision maker. They have a special network of contacts and expertise that the guest can’t possibly replicate, and they connect the dots through perceptiveness of a guest’s needs and preferences. They’re the friend you can rely on at all times.
Assistance in this regard is the act of anticipatory service that is personal, deliberate, thoughtful and discreet. AI and machine learning could lead to a personal assistant for everyone; Hospitality is the art of finding a balance between a user being in control vs. being pampered.
On ‘solved problems’…
“I was intrigued to discover that every trattoria had basically the same menu… Trattorias in Rome distinguished themselves by nuances: how each chef cooked a classic dish.” ²
Designers often consider using design systems or UX patterns as a hindrance to their creativity, or get discouraged to find out that someone else has already started work on their own big idea. Instead, the questions we should be asking are, “how do we solve a user’s problem, and find a unique way to tell a story within an existing structure?”
We should look to the past and comparable industries for solutions. What are the opportunities afforded to us through technology?
I’ll be exploring all of these concepts further in future articles, but for now, the next time you’re out at a nice restaurant, or staying at a hotel, or even lounging on the beach on vacation, consider how much time and attention was paid to craft an ideal experience, and what steps are taken (or missed) to ensure that great experience for the duration of your stay and beyond.
“There’s no cocktail in the world so great that absolutely everyone will like it.”
Kazuyo Uyeda, Proprietor of Tokyo’s internationally-renowned Tender Bar
“Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel.” ²
Footnotes
[1] Allen, Mandlebaum (trans.), The Odyssey of Homer, Bantam, 1991.
[2] Meyer, Danny. Setting the Table: the Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business. Harper, 2008.
[3] Kanani, Rahim B. A Wealth of Insight: the World’s Best Luxury Hoteliers on Leadership, Management, and the Future of 5-Star Hospitality. Black Truffle Press, 2017.
