Comparing KeepMeBooked with a paper reservation diary

Lots of guesthouses, inns and B&Bs use a desk reservation diary to manage their reservations and guests. It often looks something like this:

And with good reason: pen-and-paper still offers lots of advantages over a computer:

Some advantages of a paper reservation diary

• No training required
• Browse availability at a glance
• Record a booking just by writing it in

There are some drawbacks, though:

Some disadvantages of a paper reservation diary

• Only one user can access at a time
• No back up: lose your reservation diary and you are in big trouble
• Making amendments/changes is hard: cross out and re-write
• Doesn't create booking confirmations/invoices for you
• You can't link a paper reservation book to a website

At KeepMeBooked we offer web-based reservation software. Our aim has been to retain all the advantages of paper, without any of the disadvantages:

Retain the advantages of a paper reservation diary...

No training required: You don't need training or a manual to use KeepMeBooked. Each screen is kept free of clutter so it is obvious what to do and how to do it.

Browse availability at a glance: The calendar shows two weeks at a time, and the screen smoothly scrolls to and fro as you require.

Record a booking just by writing it in: Just click on an available room and type the guest's name and phone number. If that's all you want to record, you don't have to enter anything else. Or you can record more detailed information on the next screen.

... with none of the disadvantages:

Access from anywhere: you can access KeepMeBooked from any computer with an internet connection. From the kitchen, from your son-in-law's house, or even when you are on holiday yourself.

Backups: KeepMeBooked data is stored on secure servers with multiple hard drives. If one hard drive fails, the others take over, there is no loss of data. If all the drives on a server fail at same time (highly unlikely, in the absence of a sledgehammer) we can restore from a separate back-up.

Make changes: Just drag a booking from one room to another, or from one date to another. Easily display and update guest details.

Create booking confirmations: One click creates a PDF booking confirmation, showing costs and payments, which you can print or email to your guest.

Embed on websites: use our widget to take bookings from your own existing website, or opt to include your property in third-party sites like Expedia and Hotels.com. (not yet available - coming soon!)

Take a look for yourself (get your free KeepMeBooked trial here), and feel free to add your comments below on the pros and cons of using a paper diary to record guest reservations.

KeepMeBooked's target market: people who hate their current software

I asked one user at yesterday's usability test how he thought KeepMeBooked compared to the software used at his hotel. (Let's call that software "Epsilon")

"I hate Epsilon! It's terrible. Everything is so small, there are all these little lines and boxes. They let you customise all the views and all the colours, but it still looks terrible and you can't find anything on the screen."

Music to my ears.

One: it's worth putting some effort into good design. All hotel reservation systems I've seen look like they were designed by people who think spreadsheets look beautiful. Good design makes software easier to use: you don't have to squint at the screen to find what you need, the design should make it obvious where to go and what to click.

Two: this competitor has a big share of the small guesthouse / B&B market, which is exactly the market we are going after. I had been worried about that. But, actually, maybe they have created a ready-made market for us: users who have already made the transition from desk diary to software, but who hate their software and are ready to try something new.

I'm guessing this is pretty much the thought process ZenDesk went through when they decided to enter the already over-crowded helpdesk software market.

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Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management

Usability: submenu items, scrolling calendars, and more.

We had our first proper formal usability test for KeepMeBooked yesterday.

Video summary above, but if you don't like video, here's what we found:

Extras (Champagne on arrival, parking, etc.) were pretty confusing. They sit below rooms on the rooms page, so everyone thought they had to configure them as part of each room. Then when it came to actually configuring them, no-one could find them again, no-one scrolled right to the bottom of the rooms page. Need to put them on a separate page. Easily done.

No-one spotted the 'Setup Seasons' item under 'Settings' when looking to set up seasons. Everyone clicked on the Settings tab itself, no-one hovered long enough to notice the drop-down menu. Also easily fixed by making the tab itself unclickable, forcing the user to pick a sub-item.

Bookings which go over the end of the current view in the calendar caused problems. The calendar only scrolls two weeks at a time, no less, so users could never get to see the whole of these bookings in one view, which they found very frustrating. Solution: allow scrolling one day at a time.

'Cancel' and 'Delete' buttons confusing on the booking details screen. 'Cancel' cancels your changes, doesn't cancel the booking. And all users reluctant to hit 'Delete', felt too drastic, one user saying she expected it to "delete the entire page". Need to clarify those buttons.

And this is a weird one: when recording a deposit on a booking, everyone typed the amount of the adjustment in the field intended for the description, not in the field with the currency symbol. Need some placeholders there to make it clear which field is for text description and which for the numeric amount.

(cross-posted at my Bruce Greig blog)

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Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management

Usability: Tips for new users and fixing date confusion

To address the usability issue we found early on (that new users don't think to create a booking by dragging in the calendar) we've added a couple of tips which appear on screen to users who have not yet created a booking.

Once you've created a booking once, the tips don't appear again, so they don't get annoying (which, let's face, 99% of "tips" are an annoying distraction).

Here they are in this video:

We've also changed how the days are displayed in the calendar. Before, all days were coloured the same, so if a view included days from two consecutive months it was sometimes unclear which days belonged to which month:

Now it looks like this:

The days from the previous month are greyed out, and use the same background as the tabs for unselected months, so much clearer which days are August and which are September in this example.

KeepMeBooked: now in public beta

OK, anyone can now sign up and have a play with KeepMeBooked - simple reservation software for guesthouses and B&Bs.

(We still have some layout issues with Internet Explorer, works best with Firefox or Chrome.)

******

Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?

Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management.

KeepMeBooked demo

First demo video for KeepMeBooked hotel reservation software:

Sage (lack of) usability

I have a few pet hates. One of them is how really, really hard it is to do anything in Sage (the market-leading accounting package in the UK). Years ago, at IfYouSki.com, I used Sage and swore never to use it again, because everything just took so long.

Then at ViaPost, I inherited a Sage system from my predecessor, but I figured, "Hey, nearly ten years have passed, probably Sage has got its act together now and the software will function less like something designed in in the mid 70s". But I figured wrong. It is still completely terrible to use, with even the most basic of tasks requiring a complex sequence of screens and clicks. And that's bad not just because it requires a lot of effort and brain-power to use, but because everything takes so much time. That's what usability is really about: letting you get stuff done quicker.

So rather than bore people to death on this in real life, I figured I'd bore people to death on YouTube instead. Here is me demonstrating how it takes several minutes of work in Sage just to find out why your phone spend was a little high last month. And, like, 5 seconds in Quickbooks.

(Warning, you have to have an really unhealthy interest in accounting software usability to get to the end. And noise-cancelling mic has given me a somewhat, ah, sultry-sounding voice, I don't sound like that in real life.)

KeepMeBooked is on Facebook

We have a facebook page!

Fans welcome, of course.

Using GetSatisfaction to provide support

GetSatisfaction takes forum-based support to a whole new level. I love it.

Loads of web-based businesses provide customer support through forums, from Google to tiny start-ups with no-one to answer the phones. But forum support, generally speaking, sucks. There is too much stuff to wade through, you don't know whether / when you are going to get a response, and if that response is from another user, you don't know if it is correct or not.

GetSatisfaction makes a bunch of incremental improvements to the typical support forum, producing something that really works. Like making it easy to find similar questions/answers; rating answers so others know what works; and making it clear who's a user and who represents the company.

Forum support is usually treated like second-class support ("Our Gold and Silver packages have 24/7 phone and e-mail support; Bronze users have forum-based support") - but with something like GetSatisfaction, the user's experience can actually be better than email or phone support.

Take this question about Spreedly which I asked on GetSatisfaction the other day. The most detailed, and useful, response comes not from Spreedly, but from another user who currentlyisn't even a Spreedly user ("[we] then turned Spreedly off because of a PayPal issue (currently being resolved.)").

A Spreedly employee responds also, but not with as much detail. But even I'd had that much detail from Nathaniel (the Spreedly employee), it would not have been as convincing as hearing it from another user.

We'll certainly be using it for KeepMeBooked (that is, once we have some customers to support, which could be as soon as December, by the way).

Surprising usability finding (2)

Take a look at this screengrab:

What month is displayed?

September, right? (September tab is highlighted).

But the user (following instructions to create a booking commencing 1st September) just kept clicking the September tab, like it wasn't highlighted. Like she still needed to select September, because September wasn't showing properly.

I'm thinking: What's going on here? 1st September is right there. There! Just click-and-drag (she'd figured out the clicking and dragging bit now).

Luckily, I've been reading lots of Jakob Nielsen lately and so we were using the thinking aloud method. It soon became apparent that she was focusing just on the left hand edge of the calendar:

Seeing the 30th and 31st there, she thinks something is wrong. Those days are supposed to be from September. But September doesn't have 31 days. So they can't be September. So it isn't displaying correctly. So better click September tab again. Repeat.

So: need to make some changes to make it clearer which days are from the selected month, and which have just crept onto the screen from the previous month.

Surprising usability finding (1)

Here's a screengrab of me adding a new booking to the KeepMeBooked calendar:



Pretty straightforward, right? Drag across a x days to create a booking of x days in length. Never occurred to me that this would be anything other than quite obvious.

But in our first usability test, the user did this:

Clicking one day at a time, rather than dragging across a series of days.

I offered a few hints, she tried a few different things but didn't do what I thought was the most obvious thing: dragging across a range of dates.

So I showed her. She watched, then asked me to do it again, watching my fingers intently to see what I was doing with the mouse. It dawned on me that I was showing her something completely new.

Out of curiosity, I asked her to select a four neighbouring icons on her desktop. She couldn't do it. She'd click on one icon, then try and drag the mouse to select another, but of course that just moved the first icon.

This user just didn't know you could use the mouse to drag a selection rectangle and so select multiple things. And why would she? She uses a computer extensively for emailing and using the internet, but those things rarely need you to select an area of the screen (maybe only to change the formatting of, say, a whole paragraph in an email).

So what I thought was a really simply easy way to enter a booking on the calendar turns out to be actually quite hard, at least for this user.

KeepMeBooked - new project

I have a new project.

It is called KeepMeBooked and will provide web-based software for owners of independent hotels, allowing them to manage their bookings, guests, etc. And to take online bookings.

It is kind of amazing that almost ten years after I last worked in the online travel industry (on the team which set up and ran ifyouski.com in the last dotcom boom), most hotel accommodation is still not available to book online. Pretty much 100% of travellers will search on the internet to book their holiday. But only something like 20% of accommodation is actually available to book online. That is just amazing. What's the industry being doing whilst I was away? ;-)

And the reason why most accommodation is not available to book online?

Because the availability information is still being stored on paper or on a local PC. You can't easily distribute that information onto the internet.

Put that information in the cloud, though, and the world changes. Managing true online bookings becomes a walk in the park. Whether it's offering a widget on the hotel owner's own site to take bookings, or a feed to/from Expedia, it all becomes a whole lot easier if the underlying availability information is held on a server somewhere, not in a desk diary and not in an insecure, unmanaged PC in the hotel.

At the moment, if you own a hotel and want to list your hotel on Expedia, you'll likely have to login to their extranet every day, possibly more frequently, and update how many rooms you still have available, what the rates are etc. Then you do the same thing on lastminute. And on Travelocity. And so on.

That becomes a bit of a pain, so you might pay an intermediary to distribute that information for you, logging into their extranet each morning and relying on them to distribute the data in turn to their network partners.

But it is still a manual process - you are manually, painstakingly, rekeying data from your core reservation system (a desk diary or clunky software on your local PC). And none of this helps you take online bookings from your own website.

To avoid all this manual data-entry, your reservation system needs to talk directly to your own website and to the third party travel sites. There are lots of reservation systems out there that do this, but they quickly get enormously complicated because they are aimed at large hotels who worry about yield managment, RevPAR, ADRs, rack rates, special rates, corporate rates, coupon rates, loyalty rates, etc. etc., stuff which the owner of a small guesthouse in Glenwood Springs, CO, just doesn't really care about.

Even eviivo which is aimed at smaller hotels needs a 12-page document to explain how to update your room prices. 12 pages. Seems a little complex. If you were using pen and paper, you wouldn't need 12 pages to document how to change your pricing.

My hypothesis is that if you offer the guesthouse owner a web-based tool that is almost as easy to use as pen-and-paper, you can get them to abandon their desk diary entirely and keep all their booking information in the cloud. Then, if they want to, it becomes very easy for us to provide them with true, live, online bookings.

That’s the hypothesis. Might not work. This is a pretty competitive area, it is not like I'm the only person who has thought of doing this. But, hey, I wasn't the first person to think ofoperating a handyman service, either.

Anyway, there are a few mocked-up screenshots here, if you are interested. Beta testing should start in the next few weeks.