handy – Vicky Chiu

handy

handy was an innovative mobile travel solution that combined the functionality of a personal smartphone and hotel services into one fully integrated device. It was the pioneer product of Tink Labs, one of the largest and fastest-growing start-ups in Hong Kong.

Each handy smartphone was customized for the hotel and provided travelers with free unlimited internet, local and international calls, as well as an interactive city guide and one-click access to the hotel's concierge and amenities.

handy was available in 70 cities, covering 450,000 rooms and helped 18 million global travelers stay connected.

My role

I worked as a UX/UI designer at Tink Labs. During my time there, my job responsibilities included:

Design research
UX/UI design
Prototypes
Wireframing
User testing

I had a chance to work in many projects, for example:

Enhancing the ticketing feature of handy
Designing the postcard collection feature to increase user engagement and interaction with handy by introducing fun and social elements
Designing handy ICON, a widget for increasing potential guests’ awareness of handy and helping the hotels capture more direct bookings
Designing the user experience and interface of the in-room dining feature, and its content and order management section in the hotel portal
Designing various features in the hotel portal such as customisation tool and dynamic dashboard
Exploring new design solutions for the onboarding process

Enhancing the ticketing feature of handy

The objective is to support the expansion of ticketing platform and review the experience throughout the user journey.

We adopted agile methodology and separated the project into two phases and into sprints. We focused on some critical tasks in each sprint.

I worked closely with the ticketing team and discovered some key insights during research:

Lack of space and flexibility for offerings promotion
Outdated categorisation system
How might we increase the chance of travellers to discover relevant tickets?
How might we help travellers find their desired deals more easily?

We analysed the conversion funnel of the ticketing feature and performed competitor analysis to study the user experience of the peers.

To ensure a coherent user experience, I created wireframes to allocate and prioritise the content and functions, and illustrated the user flow of the ticketing feature.

I created prototypes to test the flow and conducted user survey to collect user preference and comments.

I conducted A/B testing to get data-backed answers to my hypotheses.

One of the examples is to test the performance of the newly added categories module when placing at different positions within the page.

I came up the detailed visual design which addressed the problems found and maintained the brand consistency at the same time.

Gamification – Postcard collection

The objective is to increase user engagement and interaction with handy by bringing in fun and social elements through a postcard collection game.

According to some psychologists, collecting is associated with positive emotions. Being a collector has nothing to do with financial gain. There is the happiness from adding a new find to the collection. Travelling is like collecting experiences, the act of collecting is already inside the nature of travelling.

When the traveller is within the preset collecting zone (e.g. 1km radius from a POI), push message will be sent to the traveller’s handy.

Once the traveller opens the push message, the postcard will be automatically added into the collection.

I made some sketches to explore the UI directions.

Keeping the essential UI elements consistent, I tried to use a more fun and approachable style in the design

There are different entry points to the postcard collection game. While collecting postcards, travellers can also further explore other functions in handy.

User flow of the postcard collection game.

handy ICON

handy ICON consists of a widget which partnered hotels can easily customise and integrate in their websites. The widget aims to increase the potential guests’ awareness of handy and help the hotels convert direct bookings.

The design aims to let the hotels create and customise the widget in short time through a simple and intuitive method.

Requires no professional knowledge
Step-by-step
Provides live preview

The launch of handy ICON achieved positive results:

Once handy ICON is launched in the first hotel, 25% click rate of CTA button is measured.
That means 25% of the hotels website online visitors who opened the widget do click the CTA button to go to the room reservation page, indicated helping online visitors to be aware of handy presence in the hotels provides hotels a chance to convert more bookings.
After the soft launch phase of handy ICON, there are continuous requests from other partnered hotels on accessing handy ICON customisation platform, including some new hotels in which handy is not yet launched.
Very few hotels require technical support on handy ICON integration, indicates that the platform is intuitive to use.

In-room dining

Designed the user experience and interface of the in-room dining feature, and the content and order management section in the hotel portal

Hotel portal

Designed various features in the hotel portal such as:

Customisation tool for hotels to customise the UI of handy with their branding
Dynamic dashboard which provided hotels with an overview of handy performance, actions to be taken, reminders, tips, etc...

Onboarding process

Explored new design solutions for the onboarding process
Created quick prototypes and conducted user testing to gather feedbacks
Synthesised and presented the findings
Suggested design solutions

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