Suzannestays Accomodation Portal

Services

UX/UI design

Web application development

Project Scoping

Technology

Lamp Bot

Brief

SuzanneStays is a boutique accommodation and experience booking site, catering specifically for travellers with a disability. Keeping in mind the intended audience, it was designed for individuals who require assistive technology in their daily lives.

Let's take a deep dive

Understanding the problem

Suzanne and Michael met in November 1993, and share a common passion for travel and adventure. In December 2017 Suzanne was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND/ALS). Like many people faced with the fatal diagnosis, Suzanne created her bucket list which featured predominantly family travel, and adventures she still wanted to enjoy. Whilst travelling around the world it became obvious that there are many variations on the term 'accessible' and 'wheelchair friendly.' In addition to that, there was no easy way to search for only accessible accomodation.

Ideation & research

The scope began with an overarching vision enable the disabled to holiday away from home. This vision was fed into everything the team designed and subsequently built. The paramount focus was to allow everyone to holiday away from home without the stress of wondering whether equipment will be delivered or something is truly accessible.

The design needed to be focused around humans. We wanted people to be excited about holidaying. As a result, we created a 'build a holiday' wizard for people that know they want to go on holiday but haven't decided where to go or what to do. The other key consideration when designing SuzanneStays was acknowledging that we need a highly accessible website. Semantic HTML was a priority along with a top menu bar that allows users to increase or decrease the text size and switch into high contrast mode.

After 6 weeks of Discovery, 5 months in development, 170 feature tickets...

The solution

The core components of SuzanneStays is creating an initial interest for holidaying - achieved through the build a holiday wizard. The booking wizard stages users through the process of selecting their holiday dates, configuring the room setup and paying for the holiday. Users can then see their upcoming trips and are reminded through emails.

SuzanneStays is predicated on two sides of the market coming together; people looking for accessible accomodation and people able to provide that accomodation. To tailor to two sides of the market, we created two portals. This second portal stages property owners through the process of taking their current property, assessing whether any changes are required to make it accessible, facilitating those changes and finally, listing their property on SuzanneStays.

Knowing the product owners as well as the problem SuzanneStays seeks to address, we are delighted to see the result of the entire team's hard work coming to fruition. We will be with them at every stage of the journey.