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Hospitality CMS: Scalable Room Management & Device Provisioning for Hotel Operations

How I redesigned a broken hotel operations workflow, cutting room onboarding time by 75% and reducing support tickets by 75%, by giving non-technical staff a system that actually makes sense.

Objective

Skills Used

UX Strategy
Heuristic Evaluation
Flow Mapping
Interaction Design
Dev Handoff 
Error Validation

Timeline

6-8 Weeks

Hotel IT admins and operations staff were managing hundreds of rooms and connected devices through a system that wasn't built for scale. The existing flow was manual, inconsistent, and required constant support team intervention. During busy property onboarding periods, teams were spending 20+ minutes setting up a single room group and even then, errors were common. My task was to redesign this from the ground up.

I owned the end-to-end UX design of this feature module

  • Collaborated with Product Manager and Engineering Lead

  • Conducted heuristic evaluations and stakeholder workshops

  • Designed new scalable flows, UI components, and error-handling systems

  • Delivered high-fidelity prototypes and annotations for dev handoff

  • Supported QA and testing

My Role

⚠️ Challenges Identified

1. Broken hierarchy visibility: Users couldn't clearly navigate the Location → Building → Floor → Room structure, leading to duplicate entries and skipped steps.
2. Failing CSV uploads: ~55% of CSV bulk uploads failed because there was no template guidance, no error feedback, and no flexible format support.
3. No Wi-Fi validation: Rooms with mismatched Wi-Fi credentials were being grouped together, causing devices to fail provisioning silently.
4. No step-by-step guidance for device mapping: Staff were guessing how to connect devices to rooms, with no visual cues or status feedback.
5. Over-reliance on support: 60+ support tickets per month were being raised just for provisioning issues that should have been self-serve.
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Research & Insights

I ran three research activities over the first two weeks:


Stakeholder interviews with internal operations staff and the customer support team revealed that most provisioning problems weren't user error they were system design failures. The UI gave no feedback, no confirmations, and no recovery paths.


Task analysis of the existing flows showed that users were skipping hierarchy steps (often going straight to "Room" without selecting a Building or Floor), which caused silent data errors downstream.


Comparative audit of enterprise admin tools (Google Workspace Admin, AWS Console) helped establish baseline expectations for bulk upload UX and status visibility.

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  • Users routinely misunderstood the 4-level hierarchy and either duplicated rooms or created orphaned entries

  • CSV uploads had a ~45% success rate because the template was undocumented and errors weren't surfaced

  • Staff had no way to tell if a provisioning code had successfully reached a device

  • Removing a device from a group had unknown consequences no warning, no confirmation

Key Findings

Hierarchical Navigation System

The existing UI showed a flat list of rooms with no visible structure. I redesigned it as a persistent hierarchical navigation panel: Location → Building → Floor → Room with filter logic that collapses and expands each level.

Why this approach: Staff managing a 400-room property need spatial orientation, not just search. The breadcrumb-style nav mirrors how they think about the physical building, reducing cognitive load and wrong-level entries.

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Empty State + CSV Upload Wizard

When a property has no rooms set up yet, the empty state now presents two clear paths instead of a blank screen:
→ Add Room Manually: a guided step-by-step flow with inline validation
→ Upload CSV: with a downloadable template and a 3-step wizard (upload → validate → confirm)

Why a wizard pattern: The old single-page upload gave no feedback until submission. Breaking it into steps allowed us to surface row-level errors before anything was committed, which is what pushed the CSV success rate from 45% to 95%.

The upload wizard handles three flexible structures:
✅ Floors & rooms only
✅ Tower & rooms
✅ Building + Tower + Rooms (default fallback for mixed properties)

Device Grouping UX

Visual grouping panel with clear information “All rooms in a group must share the same Wi-Fi password.”

Validations block mismatched rooms during group creation or edits.

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Room + Device Management (Edit & Remove)

Multi-select Add Rooms to Group:
Validated rooms before addition (Wi-Fi check).  

Included confirmation modal explaining consequences (blueprint uninstall, reset warning).

PWA Provisioning Setup (Device Side)

Designed a hierarchial quick navigation with filter logic  
→ Location → Building → Floor → Room

Helps users easily orient themselves when managing large properties.

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Final UI Snapshots

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Impact & Results

Metric

Room onboarding time

CSV Upload Success Rate

Support tickets for provisioning

QA Feedback Score

Before

~20 mins per group

~45% (error-prone)

60+

6.8/10

After

< 5 mins per group

95% (with template + validations)

< 15

9.4/10

UX Strategy & Design Approach

Based on research findings, I prioritized redesigning three core flows that accounted for 90% of user errors and support tickets

  1. Room Management Hierarchy & Bulk Upload

  2. Device Grouping Based on Wi-Fi Credentials

  3. Provisioning Devices via 6-digit Authentication Codes

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