When Flexkeeping began in 2013, Aljaž and I took on one of the biggest challenges in the field of software design (UX and UI). How to design an app for hotel housekeepers who might have never used a smartphone before, much less 8 hours per day? The challenge didn’t end there. On top of this, not all housekeepers speak the same language, and their devices would have to withstand some wear and tear. Just imagine all the times the devices would probably fall on the floor, be sprayed with cleaning substances, or even fall into the water. And most importantly, how to make a housekeeper’s job easier and their lives better? The solution was a combination of hardware and software design.
Smartphones seemed to be the logical option, but in 2013, we saw 3 main drawbacks with them:
For all of these reasons, we thought the real innovation in hotel housekeeping software might be a different hardware approach.
Back then, another group of young entrepreneurs had recently launched a successful company called Visionect. They had developed a product based on e-paper technology, and its main use at that time was as a tabletop restaurant e-menu & ordering solution. What got our attention was that the hardware offered a couple of unique features that could give our hotel housekeeping software solution a special edge. Several aspects made it appear as the perfect solution to cater to housekeepers’ working conditions:
It seemed like a match made in heaven. Here is what the first version looked like on a Visionect device.
In 2013, the 1st version of Flexkeeping was running on Visionect’s e-paper tablets and had been tested in 2 hotels: a city hotel with 154 rooms and another city hotel with 87 rooms.
The Great
The Questions
We loved the potential of the devices and we were positively surprised by the vast variety of possibilities with e-paper. Another huge success was the user interface and that housekeepers knew how to use it immediately. However, we did see one challenge with the concept.
For us, e-paper was a great platform for simple hotel housekeeping communication purposes. For example, updating room statuses with one click. But in the future, if a housekeeper wanted to send a message, picture, or another more flexible and multimedia message, it just wouldn’t have been possible. We also realised we might not want to manage hardware, but rather focus solely on our hotel housekeeping software.
Eventually, smartphones became cheaper, in addition to their overall usability and flexibility, which solidified them as the more appropriate solution. By the end of 2013, we already had the first version of Flexkeeping ready for Android phones. Meanwhile, Visionect become an enormously successful company, with one of their products being Joan, the world’s #1 Meeting Room Scheduler.
Not at all. Think of all the hundreds of thousands of hotels worldwide that still don’t use any hotel housekeeping software. They are often worried that their housekeepers won’t know how to use a smartphone app. Instead, many still use the outdated method of updating a room’s status with a 4-digit code on the in-room phones or nothing at all. For all these cases, we could have prepared a solution where a hotel orders 20 e-paper tablets”, takes them out of the box and immediately starts using Flexkeeping.
However, we envisioned how the hotel housekeeping solution of the future would look, and it included smartphones.
The interface we currently use is a result of all that we learned in 2013 with the e-paper platform and beyond. If we hadn’t gone through that learning process, it would not be what it is today - a unique and internationally leading hotel housekeeping software interface.
We can’t wait to see our interface in 2029 🙂
All the best,
Luka