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Ep.9 Transcript - The Hotel Experience With Kim Goodwin - Uncomfortably Resting
Geoff Wilson [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of the Everyday Experiences Podcast, where we uncover potential design improvements in the world around us by exploring one frustrating experience at a time. I'm your host and chief observer Geoff Wilson, based out of Auckland and joining me today is special guest Kim Goodwin based out of San Francisco. She's a well-known design and product leadership consultant, conference speaker and author of "Designing for the Digital Age". And today, we'll be talking about an experience I've been eager to cover since the beginning: the design of hotels. But first, it's good to meet you, Kim!
Kim Goodwin [00:00:33] Hey, thanks for having me, Geoff.
Geoff Wilson [00:00:35] So, again, what got us into this for everybody listening is you had some images of a recent hotel stay from digital remotes to I think it was showers and things like that, and I was like, "Yes, I love when people start talking about things that aren't just websites and apps," so reached out. Very glad to have you. This is great. I'm excited.
Kim Goodwin [00:00:52] Yeah. Well, it's funny. I have sort of a long history of posting hotel showers and other things to the point where people now send them to me just because in the before times pre-COVID, I would spend about half of each month traveling. And so I just... let's just say I've encountered a lot of hotels. So anything I say today is not from the perspective of designing the hotel, it's from the perspective of staying at it.
Geoff Wilson [00:01:18] As people have probably known if they've listened to this before, and if you haven't, it's a very speculative, exploratory kind of podcast. So we'll just randomly pick a spot and go with it. But in this case, because you had a specific, like, starting point of that shower, for example, let's go into that because I can share the images on social media afterwards and talk about what that was.
Kim Goodwin [00:01:35] Sure. Well, I think showers were a thing that I happened to notice because, well, I don't know about you, but I sort of have a hierarchy of needs that I want out of a hotel room, right? One is, can I get a decent sleep? Two is can I take a decent shower without freezing or scalding myself in the morning when I'm groggy and using unfamiliar shower controls? And, it turns out that I was seeing a pattern in, I guess you'd call them, boutique hotels or hotels that are trying to be kind of fancy in some way. And unlike your average Marriott or whatever, they all have these funky shower controls that are hard to figure out because there's too many knobs and too many showerheads. And even worse, they're inevitably positioned in such a way that you can't turn on the shower without standing under the water which, you know, is maybe not the way I want to start my morning with ice cold water or scalding water hitting my body.
Geoff Wilson [00:02:32] Then you can't just reach in there... like maybe get a long pole or something, reach out and turn off the tap and run away haha.
Kim Goodwin [00:02:38] Oh, I mean, you should see the dance I do, sometimes trying to reach around the edge of the shower and grab it. And oh yeah, it's always entertaining.
Geoff Wilson [00:02:44] So boutique ones especially? I mean, is that just because of like the dials that they have, they just try to make it look really flashy and elegant and stuff and therefore it gets kind of hard to use? Or is it just that the controls themselves are just a mystery in terms of how you turn, twis,t pull, whatever it might be?
Kim Goodwin [00:03:00] Well, I mean, I think there's, you know, there are brands of hotels like some of the big chains that we have in the United States, for example, you know, Marriott, Hyatt, and so on. They're mostly about being kind of a reliable, predictable experience, right? And so I may be a little on the bland side, and they certainly still make design mistakes, but you won't usually find really weird stuff there. But a hotel that is trying to have a personality, sometimes the personality is a little peculiar. So, for example, I was staying at the W Hotel in Washington, D.C. once, and it's located right by the White House. And so there's all sorts of little references to D.C. politics and every room has on the bed a set of pillows. And there's a pillow in the center that is half of a president's head from about the nose up. So it's the top half of the president's face. And so it's a little strange to walk into your room and see Bill Clinton in your bed. You know, it's just not, not the experience I want in a hotel haha.
Geoff Wilson [00:03:59] Hahaha you know, there's some other kind of joke in there that we'll just let your mind think of that haha.
Kim Goodwin [00:04:04] We're just going to let that one lie. Yes. But you know, there were all sorts of other weird little touches about this. So in the bathroom, in this particular hotel, you go and you sit down on the toilet, if that's the thing that you do. And right across from you is this wallpaper that's, I don't know, some sort of fancy black and white illustration, whatever. But it's done in such a way that it looks like someone has poked a hole in the wallpaper and is staring straight at you.
Geoff Wilson [00:04:32] Uhhhhhh, OK...
Kim Goodwin [00:04:32] And the goal of this is to, I don't know, make you uncomfortable while doing your business or what? It was just a strange design choice, right? So it just makes me wonder if the people who design hotels ever actually stay in them sometimes? Haha.
Geoff Wilson [00:04:46] Actually, that's a really interesting point, because now I'm thinking, yeah, I wonder if people ever do stay in their own hotels in the sense of, you know, it's a long shift and they've got to work the next morning. And like, "You know what, sometimes I just need to stay overnight because I wasn't meant to work morning and night, but now I have to." So I wonder how many opportunities, even just like the front staff, like the front desk staff, I wonder how often they actually do that and if they do notice anything about that? And, do they actually recommend anything after that? Haha.
Kim Goodwin [00:05:09] You know, I don't have actual knowledge of this; someone told me, so it could be totally wrong. I have heard that the four, I think it's the Four Seasons? Which is a fairly high end hotel chain. Maybe it's the Fairmont? One of the high end chains. I've heard that when they hire new staff, they actually give them a free stay in one of the hotels so that they experience what a high end hotel is supposed to be like. I don't know if it's true, but it does make a certain amount of sense if you're a high-end organisation to try to do that. But you know, it's so often not about the hotel staff, although certainly the staff is part of the user experience, right? The weird stuff is more often the design. I will say more often than not, I find the hotel staff is really helpful. There's a hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts that I stayed in a number of times, and let's just say it was often enough that I would walk in the door with my suitcase and they'd say, "Hey, Ms. Goodman, how are you doing?" And they just knew who I was, and that was kind of nice! You know, if I'm spending that many nights away from home to at least have some people I recognized and could chat with.
Geoff Wilson [00:06:11] Yeah, they become a surrogate family... hahaha.
Kim Goodwin [00:06:13] Well, that's a sad though haha! But you know, it is the sort of personal touch and like that particular hotel, you know, every once in a while, they would just leave a little something in my room. Just, "Hey, thanks for staying with us so often." And you know, the manager would write a note and there would be, I don't know, local chocolate or something. And you know, it wasn't a super fancy hotel or anything. It was just, "Hey, we've noticed you've stayed with us often." It didn't feel canned, if you know what I mean? Like some of those insincere, "Thanks for staying with us. We do this the 17th time everyone like you stays with us." It just seemed a bit random and a bit genuine, which made it nice. So not all hotel UX is terrible stuff.
Geoff Wilson [00:06:53] And it's good to start out that way haha; we'll start out above the line and we'll dip down eventually haha. But I guess actually, that's a really good point, because what I was curious about is how often do people have that one bad experience or a particularly good experience, and they actually remember it for years on end? And that could actually drive whether or not they stay there again? In this case, you've named off a few hotels that you specifically remembered from kind of negative things to kind of super good positive aspects, which basically answers that question! Because what I was thinking is, let's say you had a hotel in a city with like high tourism or high travel. You know, you might think as an owner in terms of measurement and values, "I have such a high turnover, such a high unique visitor rate, you know, if one of them has an issue, I don't necessarily need to do anything about it because they're not going to stay here for years to come. Forget about it." But in this case, some of your examples are even if you stay there just one time for maybe a few days, you've never remembered what that was like and that actually could shape your shopping decision later on when you're going to book years from now. And you go, "Hey, you know what? I don't really want to stay there ever again," or, "I really like that place. I wonder if the manager still working there. I'd love to chat to them again."
Kim Goodwin [00:07:55] Yeah. Well, I mean, I think some of these things certainly do for me, at least shape that decision. So the W in D.C., right? Whatever pillow they throw on the bed, with maybe one or two exceptions, wouldn't change my mind about staying there. But I didn't even tell you one of the other weird things, which is that the shower is enclosed in glass... and it's wide open to the rest of the room. So I mean, lots of people are staying there alone, but even so, that feels a little exposed and weird. But if you're staying with your partner or whatever, do you really want them watching your shower? Maybe? I don't know, if that's your thing?
Geoff Wilson [00:08:32] Yeah, and half the time we have just friends and family and...
Kim Goodwin [00:08:35] Yeah, exactly. So, you know, you certainly couldn't share a room with a friend unless you were _really_ good friends or you didn't have any body issues or whatever. But there's just a lot of interesting choices that people make. And, you know, sometimes I think about being the nerd that I am, can I sort of categorize some of the issues in hotel? You acts like there's creepy UX, there's discriminatory UX, there's UX that interferes with my goals like getting sleep. There's UX that's just weird and occasionally there's UX that's... pretty good! That's surprisingly thoughtful. And you know, those are pretty memorable, too.
Geoff Wilson [00:09:09] So maybe we'll go in backwards order of, we'll get those nice juicy ones at the end of creepy and discriminatory because I think those would be like some of the big highlights haha. So maybe just interrupting first? Because as you mentioned, you mentioned the hierarchy of needs of sleep and shower at a minimum, right? Mainly sleep. "I need to go there. I need to sleep well." Now one of the things - and this is just me mean nit picking on stuff - do I bring my own pillow? Because depending on where I'm going, like if I'm flying somewhere, you know, yeah, I'm not gonna bring a pillow on the plane. But if I am like driving to another town and I know I'm going to stay there, or maybe I'm on a road trip because you don't know what kind of people you're going have staying there, there's going to be a huge variety. So, you've got to kind of sometimes dabble the middle ground I guess a lot. Like, you know, "There's a pillow that's not too firm, not too soft. We just we have to kind of get in the middle." But then if you have a strong preference for one or the other, there's not really a thing they can do. They just go, "We've got one pillow type."
Kim Goodwin [00:09:57] Ah, it depends on the hotel though. That's actually a solvable problem. So I have seen a couple of solutions to it. One is, I would say, they're sort of decent mid-range business hotels. I've seen a couple - I don't remember the names - that put a couple of different pillow types on the bed. There's also, you know, some hotels will let you check a box and say, give me a feather free bed. And then in a posh hotel, there's a pillow menu... Which is, "We have seven or eight kinds of pillows and you can call the concierge and have someone deliver it to your room." And you know, they have everything from like side sleeper pillows to super squishy ones. And they have a whole range. I mean, a little pretentious, but it's a solvable problem if you choose to, right? And so that, you know, certainly we all make choices - if we have the means to make those choices - about the kind of hotel that we stay in and what's important to us. And I think some are known for certain things and others are not.
Geoff Wilson [00:10:55] That raised an idea in my head of a new business venture, which I actually hope people _don't_ do, but it's kind of like the budget airline of hotels where you get the most basic stuff, but everything's upgrade-based. Like a Ryanair, if you've ever flown them in the U.K.. It's like, "Oh, well, this is our pillow menu. You get the most basic thin, one inch deep pillow, but for X money dollars, you can buy the next level or the next level or the next level!" Or, "We won't slam doors or we won't do this, or we'll give you an extra light bulb haha if you just pay a little bit more."
Kim Goodwin [00:11:21] Well, OK, but those those experiences are all about having something that's bad enough to pay to avoid, right? Which, I don't know, if I get to a strange city and I'm tired, I definitely don't want to deal with that. Some people might, but it does make me think of umm... so you talk about comparing hotels to airlines? I will say there's something I can do on most airlines that I _wish_ I could do in a hotel, which is pick my room. So, if you look at an airline website that's at all decent, you can see where the seats are, you can see which ones are close to the galley or the bathroom, i.e. noisy. But in a hotel, you don't really know, "Is that room they're going to give me next to the elevator and noisy? Is it? Is it above the noisy bar?" You know, "Is it next to the ice machine?" And, so these are all things that, personally, I would kind of like to be able to choose. Yeah, that's one of the things I've often wished for in Hotel UX.
Geoff Wilson [00:12:17] Would you pay in that sense for actually the ability to choose your room? Is that something that just you as a consumer would be interested in?
Kim Goodwin [00:12:24] Well, I mean, hotels do this to some extent already, right? A lot of them will have a couple of room tiers like they'll have a river view room or a - I don't know what do they call it - a terrace view room, which usually means the parking lot or something haha. But they have a little bit of that structure already, so you already know you're getting some category. But within that category, you don't know if it's going to be right next to the elevator, so you hear Ding Ding Ding all night.
Geoff Wilson [00:12:49] Yeah, and then I actually did have a recent one of that. We went to this kind of resort area and it was called the "Ocean View Room", and we saw the pictures, we were like, "This is perfect." And we got there and we find out like, "Oh, well, yeah, you have an ocean view room," but it's an ocean view over top of this parking lot over top of this little camp area, and _then_ there's the ocean. And we're like, "But, your images on the website make it look so like you can see the thing clearly!" And they're like, "Oh, no. That's the _upgraded_ room."
Kim Goodwin [00:13:14] That's where you're trading one part of the user experience for another, right? Which is, there's some team that works on the website that's thinking, "Hey, how do I convert the best? Oh, I should use these sexy photos." And then that sets you up with the wrong expectation for some later part of the user journey, right? And so the hotel staff now has to deal with that frustrated guest. So this lack of kind of the journey level view I think you mentioned earlier, is definitely a big problem in hotel UX as it is everywhere else, right? So, if you don't set the expectations right early on, some later part of the experience becomes a problem.
Geoff Wilson [00:13:51] Yeah. And then it's... because then there's always the aspect of what will people actually complain about? What kind of things are happening that you wouldn't actually know? So, you know, there's feedback surveys and things. But, that requires people to actually go, "I'm going to spend my time going out and writing this comment card or this thing online and telling you about this issue," or just going, "Arrrgghhh!" and just throwing it down and just walking out of the hotel the next day at checkout and just not saying a word. And you never know! You think everything's peachy keen!
Kim Goodwin [00:14:15] And there's so many of the things in the minor annoyance category, right, that you'd never complain about, but they don't help. Like on the topic of getting good sleep, there's always annoying noises and lights in hotel rooms, right? So there's always that mini bar fridge that makes the compressor noise. First thing I do in the hotel room, I unplug that sucker! If I can reach the plugs; some of them hide the plug from me and I can't do it.
Geoff Wilson [00:14:37] The one of the first things I do is, I plug the alarm clock. Because for one, I've got an alarm on my phone; I don't need it. It's just because I'm that kind of believer that the more ambient light you have in your room, the less good sleep you have. So I'm a big proponent of that. Those alarm clocks are usually like blinding white at night.
Kim Goodwin [00:14:52] I'm with you on the lights, right? So another common one is if for some reason you had your Do Not Disturb up and the housekeeping couldn't come in. You know, they leave you a voicemail message and you see that blinking light all night. Or, sometimes you'll have a hotel where the phone just has a red light that blinks for no reason? [Haha] I am a weirdo. I travel with black electrical tape in my bag so I can cover those things up. I pull it off so the housekeepers don't have to, but that way doesn't keep me awake next to the bed. So, yeah, you're learning that I'm just a weirdo about travel things. That's fine.
Geoff Wilson [00:15:21] Well, you're giving another weirdo tips on what to do. And I'm like, "I do have a roll of black masking tape that, *snap*, might work..."
Kim Goodwin [00:15:26] Yeah, well, another another good trick is, you know how sometimes the curtains just won't quite close and there's some bright light outside? [Always.] You go in the closet and grab a pants hanger, clip-clip, that will keep the curtains closed.
Geoff Wilson [00:15:39] Hey! This has now turned into a life hack podcast; I like it hahaha.
Kim Goodwin [00:15:44] Ahahaha. So anyway, but you know, I don't complain about these just stupid little things to the hotel staff, right? Because it's not their fault. Nobody's going to go back and fix it. But you know, there's so many things, and if you're traveling internationally, there's a bunch of stuff that is maybe going to be different from expectations, right? Like, I always feel sorry for people from Commonwealth countries who come to stay in US hotels. Because, if you drink tea, you are just out of luck. Because all there is is that coffee maker and whatever water you boil in it is going to taste like nasty old, stale coffee, right? So, you know, it's about who is coming to your hotel and what are their expectations.
Geoff Wilson [00:16:25] And that's a particularly fun note on international. So, for one, real quick, yeah, I don't like coffee. I drink tea. So yeah, it's... hotel tea is always the most disgusting tea generally, too.
Kim Goodwin [00:16:33] Oh, it's horrible.
Geoff Wilson [00:16:34] But on top of that, it's...yeah, this is a thing I've seen in more of the US more than one time now that as a person with international phone numbers and things now and addresses and billing, you know, international billing addresses for my credit card and stuff, you go to book something in the US whenever I'm traveling home and you get that, "Oh, well, we don't accept that because we never thought about having that... We're a hotel, but yet we never considered somebody internationally booking and using a non-American phone number or a non-American address to put in this stuff," and it's just bashing your way into whatever it is just to meet some requirements somewhere.
Kim Goodwin [00:17:06] Oh, there's all kinds of that. I mean, just bad form design on hotel registration; deceptive booking practices like the one you encountered. There's so much of that stuff. There's the websites that for some reason require you to give yourself a label like Miss or Mister or what have you, and thereby exclude lots of people who don't use those labels. There's so many form design issues, for sure.
Geoff Wilson [00:17:30] So with that, let's get into that deceptive pricing. The only one that I have on that in my head is I was talking to my friend and he talked about he uses Booking.com because it's kind of like his own travel agent. He can do multiple trips, multiple hotels, multiple things in one platform, so he has one place to go with all of his tickets. Versus, he was working with a hotel owner and the hotel and was complaining that, "Well, I don't see why people just don't go to our site and book it? Because then, you know, we'll offer the same prices that other, _and_ we don't need to give Booking.com a cut of our profits. Why don't people just go to our site?" And when he told me that, he basically said what she failed to realize was that that idea that it's not just you.. you're not the sole person, you're not the sole part of that trip as we talked about the journey, again. You're just one little aspect. And so for a traveler, it might actually be great to go to these other sites that give you good discounts or at least the appearance of good discounts and things. So that's what I know from the pricing side. And naturally, you get some of those, especially like sites like Booking.com, you know, "Two rooms left! Book now!" Some of those like, you know, enticing kind of aspects to it to try to get you to get it. But what other examples do you have in your mind about deceptiveness?
Kim Goodwin [00:18:34] And actually, on some of those, that number is just generated randomly and it has nothing to do with how many rooms are actually available. So we can talk about negative patterns another time. But you know, on the pricing front is interesting because I'm not sure everybody understands the trade-offs in, you know, going to someplace like an Expedia or whoever and booking because, you know, you can you can better compare hotels and _maybe_ you'll get a better rate? Maybe not? I actually never use those because what happens is the hotel then disowns any responsibility for a problem with your booking. Right? And if something goes awry, you're kind of stuck. You have to call the website and get them to deal with that because the hotel front desk often either can't or won't. And it's not always clear to me how much is can't and how much is won't. In some cases, I think really the systems that the hotel staff have to deal with are not set up to accommodate how people actually book rooms. You know, certainly there's stuff that's weird based on the back end IT, as is often the case in UX.
Geoff Wilson [00:19:40] So what about other aspects of discriminatory UX in terms of hotels?
Kim Goodwin [00:19:45] Sure. Well I think there's tons of ways that hotels exclude people, right, from registration to, you know, a form that maybe doesn't recognise your gender or something. Accessible hotel rooms? There's usually maybe one or two accessible hotel rooms in the place, and they are in the nastiest, noisiest, darkest corner of the hotel, inevitably. And why can't we just make hotel rooms at least more accessible by default? Right? There's there's a bunch of stuff you could do in the average hotel room that wouldn't make anyone else uncomfortable, but would make it accessible to a lot more people. And that's, you know, lots of different kinds of accessibility, right? There's wheelchair accessibility. There's accessibility for people with low vision or anything else. There's all the scented cleaning products and feathers all over the place. And there's that kind of stuff that inconveniences a lot of people or can cause even bigger issues for folks. There's stuff that, as a white woman, I never noticed for a long time until someone pointed out to me that the hair products in most hotels don't work for black hair. [Interesting.] Right? You'll end up with a frizzy mess, as I understand it. And does anybody think about that? I don't know that a lot of hotels are particularly focused on whether their products, their hair products work for everybody. So, you know, unless you really think about what's our audience and who's excluded by the choices we're making, as in any other kind of design, you kind of make a conscious effort on that stuff. And a team that's not very diverse just isn't going to notice some of those things. Kind of like, I never noticed that in a hotel until somebody pointed out to me because it didn't affect me. Right?
Geoff Wilson [00:21:29] If there's a chance that if it was a very diverse side of things, would they buy their own kind of like hair products that would just be for them? Or do you think there'd be some kind of middle ground? Just genuinely curious of what do you do?
Kim Goodwin [00:21:43] I think it's like any other design problem, right? Which is, build a diverse team and have them do inclusive research and ask people what has sucked about your experience staying in hotels and learn and what hotels have felt great to you and really made you feel welcome and learn from that. It's just a matter of sitting down and listening to people and not all people like you. They're very avoidable problems, I think. And look, I know there's lots of supply chain considerations and all that other stuff, but that's where it comes down to the values; which is, if you care enough about it, there are ways to make it happen that aren't going to bankrupt you.
Geoff Wilson [00:22:24] And then even think about early talk about the pillow menu. In some ways, I guess there could be something like that for maybe it's soaps and stuff like, "Hey, we have more than this one option. Here's a list." Maybe... actually on that note, it be kind of interesting to go: would it be better to even stock a room with anything to start with? Or, do you want to introduce a little bit of a pain in terms of, "Hey, we don't want to just presume and just give you the things that we think are good, like, you know, here's the run of the shampoo conditioner soap. But you know, yes, it takes you one extra step, but here's this variety you can choose from. Choose it, and we'll bring it to you as fast as possible so that you don't really have to wait." So it's like introducing a pain to get choice?
Kim Goodwin [00:23:03] Or, you know, can you just stock some variety in the room to begin with, like the hotels that put a couple different types of pillows on the bed? Now that has costs associated with it, especially if it's the sort of hotel that people tend to walk out with all the hair products. [Yep! haha.] And so, you know, there are certainly tradeoffs there. But yeah, you know, are the teams there actually having those conversations? You know, there's plenty to gripe about in hotel experience, but I have had hotel experiences where it's clear that somebody put some thought into different aspects of the design. Like lots of us female identified people shave our legs. We can talk about whether that's a feminist thing to do or not, don't want to have that discussion haha, but you do that in the shower. And if this is a thing you've ever tried to do, you know that bending over and reaching your ankle with water running over your head is just not a pleasant experience. And so I have occasionally been pleasantly surprised that a hotel shower has a little ledge where you can prop your foot up. And I think, "Oh, they must have had some girls on the design team," right? And so that's a little touch that I appreciate. There's a hotel in Boston on the waterfront that has a little ledge next to the door. So, you know that situation where you're carrying a cup of coffee and maybe your laptop or something, and then you get back to your hotel room and you're like, "Oh, I have to fumble for my key. I guess I have to set something down on the floor to get it out"? No, they have a convenient ledge there that's the perfect size for a purse or a coffee cup. And I just thought, "Oh, that's brilliant." Right? And so there are clearly people who have stayed in hotels involved in designing this hotel. And so that's one of the things I remember about the place.
Geoff Wilson [00:24:47] Yeah, I've got to go find a picture of that because that sounds brilliant. And I'm like, ah, it's one of those I now wish every hotel I've ever stayed at, I'm like flicking through them all in my head. There's so many times that would have been amazing to have!
Kim Goodwin [00:24:57] Yeah, I'm pretty sure I tweeted a picture of it at one point because I was like, "Oh, this is clever." And then there's the kind of gimmicky stuff that, I don't know, sometimes is entertaining. Like, I've been to a couple of hotels where you can borrow a goldfish for the evening or something just to have company in your room. You know, there's silly stuff like that. That's not really the stuff that matters. The stuff that matters is more, you know, can I get good sleep and is your internet too slow? And, you know, do I have to scan a QR code in order to turn off your weird television that's automatically on when I walk in the room? So, you know, there's all that kind of stuff, too.
Geoff Wilson [00:25:36] And one last quick example going back to the shower is, you know, that stool or the stool or the ledge. It's not only good for people shaving their legs in this case, but also anybody who can't stand up for extended periods of time or, you know, has risk of slipping and falling like that. You've got a way now that they can still use that shower safely.
Kim Goodwin [00:25:53] Well, I mean, if it is actually done as a bench, yes. Sometimes there's actually just a little ledge big enough for your foot. [Oh, okay.] And it doesn't accomplish that, but I still think, "Oh, somebody put some thought into designing this." So... But yeah, the other thing I was thinking about is like safety in hotels, you know, do people really think about that? And you know, is there a cover on that little peep hole in the door? Because if not, can somebody look through it from the other side? That's creepy. I was actually in a hotel, uhh, I was surprised to have someone walk into my room thinking it was their room. They had a key to my room. And they had just checked in. And so, you know, there's an information system issue, right, that it shouldn't have allowed that to happen. That's a back end design issue, but it led to the safety issue. Who is this creepy man jumping into my room now?
Geoff Wilson [00:26:48] Yeah, I was actually going to bring that story up because that happened to my dad a few years ago, too. He went to somewhere, badged in, and then was like, "Wait, there's somebody bags and things?" He's like, for him, what's less concerning that he got into somebody else's room is he had that immediate anxiety of - he's probably listening to this so he can tell me if I'm wrong haha - he had that immediate anxiety of like, "What if they see me? It's not just that I entered the room and I see that there's somebody else's stuff there. But what if this other person now sees me," kind of like you've user experience then of that of actually going, "I swear it wasn't me!" Like, you immediately feel like the creep as this person who just wants to go to bed. But now you've done this thing and now this person in the room is looking at you like you've just barged in and you're like, "It wasn't me!" So now, you're just upset from all angles for the rest of the night haha.
Kim Goodwin [00:27:31] Yeah, yeah. There's so many ways in which, you know, staying away from home can be a lovely experience or a really disconcerting one. Or, you know, mostly fine with the occasional annoyance we can laugh at. And it's quite a range.
Geoff Wilson [00:27:45] And always worry, you know, I don't see them as often anymore at least here, but there's a lot of the hotels I've stayed in the U.S. that have like that door that separates two different hotel rooms too? That there's always a little bit of question...
Kim Goodwin [00:27:56] Oh, I hate those, they're so noisy!
Geoff Wilson [00:27:56] Yeah, it's like, well, it's noisy. And then also I'm just always like, "How do I know it's really locked? Like, how do I know it's really secure that people aren't just going to, you know, get in there in the middle of the night?"
Kim Goodwin [00:28:05] Yeah, usually they're double doors so there's not a knob on the other side.
Geoff Wilson [00:28:12] If I think of that, right, like you said that double door, the only way I as a traveler would know that is if I tried to open it and looked inside and saw another door. But what if you're like, "I want to just double check?" and you open it and you actually do see in the other room? Haha like, "Oh shit! I didn't, swear I'm not... I just wanted to know!" Hahaha.
Kim Goodwin [00:28:28] That would be disconcerting, yes.
Geoff Wilson [00:28:30] Actually, you know what, in thinking about... I was wondering if you've had any insight on that, you know, using your badge, for many things, it's not just getting in the room, but also a lot of hotels now like you have to slide in your badge into like a little keyhole kind of thing, like a little digital reader to actually turn on your lights to get electricity and all that stuff. I know it's been an annoyance for us in terms of getting in and going, "I have to keep this badge on me. I can't just leave one copy in the room." Especially if we only have one copy and one of us wants to stay in the room and the other one wants to go, but the other one wants to get back in. But nope, can't do that, because you've got to take the badge out with you.
Kim Goodwin [00:29:03] Yeah, I mean, I think the argument for that right is energy conservation. It's a lot less common in the U.S. than it is in Europe. However, another life hack for you: any hotel room key will usually work in those. So, if you happened to not remember to return a hotel room key in a previous hotel, just stick that in your travel bag and you can use that for the light switch because it's usually just the piece of plastic that is responding to and not anything encoded on the card. So because, you know, sometimes I want to charge a device or something while I'm at dinner and for it to be turned on, well, you need to have something plugged in. So anyway, silly life hack.
Geoff Wilson [00:29:39] Haha I like this.
Kim Goodwin [00:29:39] Hotel UX and Hotel Hacks.
Geoff Wilson [00:29:46] Umm there's been things around, well, for one, you talk about those keys... self-checkout? I personally love it when they have that. You know, it's great when especially you could just either drop your keys into a box or just leave them inside the room and walk out and close it. It's one less hassle, especially if you know you've got to rush to the next flight or whatever you've got to go. But then there's the opposite side of when you're checking in, some of those places - especially in the more rural kind of areas or, you know, destination areas where they only have like a check-in desk for a certain number of hours and you better get there right before then or you're not getting in the room that night, like, if you, you know you have an unexpected travel delay, it's the thing of, well, as somebody who's done that before on the road trip going, "Crap, we didn't expect for this thing to happen. We don't know if we're going to get there. We need to floor it on the highway at unsafe speeds to try to make sure we get to our room because that's the _only_ place in town to stay. If we don't get there by 9:00, we're locked out, we're sleeping in our car. What do we do?" And especially like when you're in a place with no service either because it's that kind of rural, you can't just call them and say, "Hey, I'm going to be late. Can you leave the keys somewhere?" I don't necessarily have any ideas for how to solve for that; that's just one of those personal design issues that I've found.
Kim Goodwin [00:30:53] Yeah, I mean, sometimes you can, right? Sometimes they'll leave a key for you or something. And that's where I think the aspect of hotel UX we don't maybe think about as much is, you know, there's _your_ experience, but there's also the experience of the staff who work there; who deserve to have decent jobs and be respected by the guests and so frequently have to deal with cranky people who are just jerks. And, I should try to create a decent experience for the hotel staff just because that's what you do for other humans? And some of it comes down to, you know, the financial model of the hotel industry gets in the way of that sometimes. Like, I personally don't really love somebody coming into my room when I'm gone during the day and like rearranging my toothpaste and stuff, and I'd kind of rather not have that happen. At the same time, if that housekeeper doesn't get to clean my room, then there's that much less work they get paid for doing that day in the U.S., right? And they're already paid so poorly. And, you know, how many guests actually remember to tip their underpaid housekeepers? And so, you know, there's always an aspect of staying at a hotel that I think about, like, what's the impact on on the staff? And gosh, wouldn't I rather stay at a hotel where I just know the staff is decently taken care of, and it's not my responsibility as a guest to make sure that they're paid a living wage? You know, that's a factor of the decision to choose a hotel that we don't really talk about a whole lot, and it's hard to figure out as a guest. How was the staff treated in different places? You have to do a lot of work to figure that out.
Geoff Wilson [00:32:27] And on that note, it's even interesting for me in this international angle is we don't tip a New Zealand; like, there's no restaurant tapping, there's none of that. We don't have that culture. But yet, are they expecting it or are they not? What are we supposed to do? And you get this weird kind of anxiety. Because nobody wants to outright say, "We expect this or that from you." who are you supposed to tip? It's just, it's a weird area. Don't really know.
Kim Goodwin [00:32:50] And some hotels actually try to design that part of the experience, right? I stayed at a very high end hotel in Chicago one time, and they were very explicit at check- in, "Our staff as well paid. They don't seem to be tipped." And, you know, the staff refused tips and so on. And that's just, it's wrapped into the service and you pay for it in the room rate. But, they're very upfront about how their focus is taking care of the staff so you don't need to.
Geoff Wilson [00:33:18] Yeah, that's nice.
Kim Goodwin [00:33:19] But you know, there's not going to be typical in the hotel experience, right? But, you know, it's complicated as a guest. You know, how do you have a good experience and also, how do you have a good experience without creating bad experiences for other people?
Geoff Wilson [00:33:34] Yeah. So maybe to wrap this all up, let's take that, especially that kind of thought and talk about values. It's one thing that one of my favorite lessons from is that "you are what you measure." The things that you measure as a business conflict with the things that you say that you value. "Oh, we value customers. We're customer obsessed blah blah blah," but then the only thing you care about is new acquisitions; to be damned if anybody churns or leaves or anything like that. Or, you know how many hours they spend internally, but nothing about how long customers need to do this or how much they're rating it. So I think the way I like to phrase it is, if you were to own a hotel, what kind of thing - and this is going out there haha - if you were to own a hotel, what kind of things do you think that would be interesting to measure to kind of help you guide the decisions you need to make? So thinking about all of the aspects, the creepy, the pricing aspect, the interrupting... like what kind of things would help you as a new hotel owner to start looking at?
Kim Goodwin [00:34:29] Sure. Well, I wouldn't focus on Net Promoter Score haha. [Yay! Haha] I wouldn't give people a row of five smiley frowny faces and say, "How was my service today?" I think that one aspect of measurement to consider is, you know, what's the impact of measurement on the staff, for example. So you want to make sure that you're not adversely impacting the staff by how you measure. But, I would sit down with who are the kind of people I want my hotels to serve? And I would ask them what a good hotel experience is and what a bad hotel experience is. And then I would measure against that. So, for example, how was your sleep? Did anything interfere with your sleep? Did you feel safe in our hotel? I would ask those kinds of things, right? Did you feel like anything about your hotel or your experience wasn't welcoming of some aspect of who you are? You know, I guess I would look for those kinds of things.
Geoff Wilson [00:35:30] Do you think - as often people do - they get really excited by the question, "Well, how do you how do you guarantee that that's going to that's going to turn into profit for me?" as this person who owns it? How do you shape that kind of conversation in that case?
Kim Goodwin [00:35:45] I think that's not the kind of thing you can easily convince people up of ahead of time. You just have to show them the results. But, if you can create memorably good experiences, right... the way I think about it is the way that you create superfans is to be unexpectedly good, right? To exceed people's expectations in some memorable way. They're going to remember your hotel. They're going to come back to it. If they have the opportunity, they're going to tell other people about what a great experience it was. Likewise, if you are memorably bad, they are going to tell people about that too.
Geoff Wilson [00:36:23] So actually, here's another a little challenging bit for that - because I think I heard it at another conference in the past year - around delight in unexpectedly good. Now, if you're a frequent stayer of that hotel, maybe you're on business trips often to this one city. You know, it's where the other office is, you go there all the time, you stay there all the time. After how many visits is that unexpected actually just expected now? Where you've raised the bar of what that is? So at that point, will that person be still looking for the next big thing? Or, will they just, as long as you keep delivering that, will they stay happy enough to keep visiting and keep talking about it?
Kim Goodwin [00:36:55] Well, I mean, if you look at user experience as a whole, I think there are ways in which we keep raising the bar of those expectations, right? Today's unexpectedly good is the thing people will copy tomorrow. And so you do have to come up with new things. I mean, I forget which hotel chain it was that started the warm chocolate chip cookie at check-in. But now all kinds of people have tried to replicate that, right? And some have better and worse chocolate chip cookies than others, but, you know, do you remember at this point which one it is? No, not so much. Do you remember the hotel? Will they remember your name? Yeah, probably. So, yes, I do think you have to escalate. But going back to that Cambridge hotel that I mentioned where, you know, they remembered my name and then just every once in a while, they would do a little something extra, right? They would occasionally find ways to be unexpectedly good. And I didn't expect that every time; it was more like, "Oh, cool, that's nice." Or, you know, do they start to cut you slack if you, you know, if you need a little late checkout or whatever? And they're like, "Yeah, of course, we'll we'll let you check out late," whatever. I think people start to get attached to places that they feel known. Feeling known is definitely a goal for people who use a service over and over again, right? They want to feel remembered and cared for.
Geoff Wilson [00:38:11] Yeah. Well, with that, I think that's a great way to wrap up. So outside of all the hotel life hacks we learned today, we realized that hotel stairs have a hierarchy of needs starting with, you know, getting a decent night's sleep. That interruptions and potential creepiness along those key moments, like all services, hurts that customer's experience most. Ah, most interestingly to me, we've called out some ways to deliver a more inclusive experience; all started with having a more diverse team. And overall, recognised that the best way to create brand advocates is by being unexpectedly good and sometimes simply showing your customers that you know them. So Kim, do you have any final thoughts on hotels, any last-minute things above or below the line?
Kim Goodwin [00:38:50] I think there are lots of people who do actually work very hard to make thoughtful experiences in hotels, right? And they have constraints and organizational challenges that you and I don't know about. And so it's not a knock against those people because I'm sure there are great designers working in service design and facility design and all of that. But, from a guest perspective, with the unfortunately-critical eye of a designer [haha], it's hard not to notice some of those things haha. So I hope folks take that in the spirit and which is intended.
Geoff Wilson [00:39:22] Well, thank you, Kim. How many people reach you? How would you like them to reach you; anything you'd like them to do?
Kim Goodwin [00:39:27] Probably the best thing to do is just follow me on Twitter @kimgoodwin.
Geoff Wilson [00:39:30] And with that, folks, thank you for listening to this episode, and I hope you see the design of our everyday world in a new way. To see examples of what we were talking about today and to keep this conversation going, you can find and follow us @EverydayExpPod or myself @GeoffWilsonHCD. Please consider leaving us a rating and subscribing to the show on your favourite podcasting app and checking out our previous episodes. And as always, just remember, you don't have to have a fancy job title to start noticing and improving the everyday experiences wherever you work. Thanks. And we'll be on the air again soon.
Geoff Wilson [00:40:28] [POST-CREDITS] And getting to look at these bigger, broader questions. I love, it makes me interested, but I'm hoping that in time can get more people interested in talking about things that aren't just their website. So, thank you for letting me rant! Haha
Kim Goodwin [00:40:40] Yeah! Well, you let me rant about Hotel UX for an hour for no reason, so...
Geoff Wilson [00:40:43] Hahaha.