Bryant Mao

Huazhu

Reimagining hotel digital experience at scale

UX/UI, Mobile, Branding

With 100 million users and growing, Huazhu is building its hotel empire in China. Despite being the digital first-mover, its app has stumbled by the complex legacy and indifferent offerings. It is time to reinvent itself to sustain in the competitive market.

Challenge

As the 2nd largest hotel chain in China, Huazhu has over 3000 hotels and 500,000 rooms in the country alone. The mobile app, which is the major marketplace for all its core business - hotel sales, membership program, e-commerce, and more, faces server challenges from OTAs and other competitors for their cheaper pricing and good user experiences.

The leadership team came to us with one ask: how might we reinvent the app to be differentiated and true to the company’s brand.

My Role

I work as a design lead to layout the project roadmap, facilitate the collaboration with the client, and direct the redesign from research, design all the way to production.

The old version of the Huazhu hotel app that used by 100 million users

Process in a nutshell

Using design to inspire strategic decisions

We worked closely with the Huazhu team from day one. Together, we analyzed the performance of the app and its competitors. We conducted interviews and co-creation sessions to understand our target user while staying at different hotels to experience the user journey.

Through rapid prototyping and iteration, we facilitated tangible discussion among the leadership, helping them distill what truly matters to the product and brand.

We then prioritized the core features and craft a unique design system to help the Huazhu team bring the new product to life.

Kickoff

Bridging the gaps between silos

Since the redesign will impact different business units, we kicked off the project by conducting internal interviews with leads from the brand, product, UX, marketing, service to understand their needs and interests.

We broke down the app's major features and analyzed the data of past redesign to learn what has been tried and how they perform. These efforts help us to gathered consensus quickly and highlighted key areas for the design to focus down the line.

Reduce the complexity of the app as it suffers the experience and performance

Enhance the service and membership experience so Huazhu can play its strength

Create a refreshing visual language to advocate what Huazhu stands for

Research

Putting ourselves in the user’s shoe

We start our research by interviewing business travelers, which cover 60% of the app's traffic. We used low-fidelity prototypes and co-creation exercises to probe their needs and journey. We then stayed in various Huazhu hotels to learn how the online and offline service feels from the user's perspective.

In the meantime, we reached out to experts who have rich experience in hotel membership and services to draw inspiration from their wide exposure and edge use cases.

With cheap price, people do not expect prime service, but the one that brings instant value to them.

The poor integration of online and offline make people hard to enjoy the services

The membership program is overly complicated and salesy. It diminishes the trust for people to engage.

Design

Identify the core offering through rapid prototyping

With the rich insight, we are ready to get the design running. We first divided the app into four independent experience modules - first entry, search, service, membership, and tackle them separately.

We built quick prototypes and checked in with clients daily, raised healthy tension between different functional teams to decide what matters to their business and brand. With runs of prioritization, a core feature set has emerged that fits both Huazhu’s strengths and the user’s needs.

Creating a visual language that stands out

To showcase what Huazhu stands for as a brand, we collected a set of mood boards, craft different art directions, and applied it to key screens to spark a unified vision among the leadership - affordable hotel service with integrity and elegance. The result is an image-rich, minimalist visual language that celebrates the app's content with nature and human touch.

Building a robust design system that scale

With its diverse offering, hotel brand, and business units, the app needs a robust design system to grow in scale. So, once the key experience is in place, we audited all the common components, aligned them with the new visual identity, and turn them into a set of guidelines and a UI library. The deliverable enabled the in-house UX team to work in parallel on other app parts with high consistency and efficiency.

“This level of experience design is the conversation I always want to have with our team. We learned so much about design thinking and its new approaches throughout the collaboration.”

Dou Liang Liang

Product VP of Huazhu

Outcome

Since launch, the redesigned Huazhu 3.0 app saw a 5% increase in monthly active users and a strong shift toward purchases through official channels—with 87% of bookings made via the app’s 110 million users by Q3 2021. The team embraced new design approaches, gaining confidence in leveraging their strengths to deliver a refreshed experience for China’s hospitality market.

Final Design

After 7 weeks of close collaboration, we reconstructed the app’s content structure, identified a set of key features, and create a new visual system that captured Huazhu's brand image. The new app blends online and offline services, providing an affordable, personalized experience to meet the business and recreation needs of Chinese customers.

  • 01.Focus & loose modes
  • 02.One service portal
  • 03.Maximize membership value

01

Fast & Slow modes

Fast on tasks

Users come to the hotel app with tasks in mind. If they feel lost, they will drop it right away. We prioritized key information on the first fold to make sure users always get what they need within sec.

Slow to explore

Huazhu has a lot of great content and programs that are unknown to its users. We surface that information by making it more discoverable and appealing, so users learn more about the brand and campaign when they have time.

02

One service portal

Online & offline

Offline services are Huazhu's key advantage, but they are not well integrated with the app. We blend the two into one service portal for users to take better control of the trip while getting the most out of their purchase.

Featured service

Many hotels under Huazhu have their unique services (ex. local breakfast). We celebrate the offering with feature cards that shows up contextually, so users can easily discover and enjoy them.

One service tap

The speed of problems solving is key to customer satisfaction. We created a service tab that quickly matches needs with the right representative. Helping Huazhu to better connect with its customers.

03

Maximizing membership value

Clear status and benefits

Many Huazhu members don’t know about their membership status and benefits. We highlight the information by using simple copy and visuals. This helps users understand the value better, create trust, and boost engagements.

Nudge to convert

Most of the Huazhu members have smaller points, and the bar to redeem is just too high. So we show the redeem options based on their point level to increases their motivation to convert while staying active in the long run.

Reflection

Design can be a powerful medium to align strategic decisions, especially for complex stakeholders set.

Leveraging the client’s data. It prevents reinventing the wheel while providing the initial boost for the project.

The immersive experience is the best way to develop empathy for the customer.

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