I spent time discussing with stakeholders and doing desk research about the brand within the industry to learn how MySantika will take off. I started to see patterns emerge that helped me generate these abstractions of principles:

1. Hospitality — a distinctive experience to strengthen and deliver our brand value.
2. Practical — align with technical feasibility and customer’s product knowledge.
3. Adaptive — cater the demand for upscale, mid and budget market business and leisure travelers.

A. Hospitality

Santika Hotels & Resorts brand is very well known for its value to bring the touch of Indonesia. They pamper their guests with unique local traditions, natural touch environments, perfect family values, and freshness in every aspect of the hotel, becoming ‘Indonesian Home’.

Santika’s Core Value: A touch of Indonesian Hospitality with brilliance of highest standards in hotel services.

Indonesians have unique cultural behavior. We use gestures in daily life to express our impressions with others, including hospitality. I personally think people — as an object — is the most relatable media to visualize gestures in a message.

The Illustration is one example of my effort to incorporate the Indonesian Hospitality within the app. In this case, I used figures of a receptionist, bell boy, and the guest. Hopefully this could in some way deliver the hospitality experience, not only inside the hotel area but also everywhere in MySantika App.

B. Practical

OTA has successfully delivered the product knowledge to Indonesians, even way before we kicked off MySantika. In line with the continuous growth of the industry, Indonesians are highly influenced by the design patterns that OTA applications have pushed to the store. It gets difficult for us to invent an unfamiliar pattern within the application.
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The screens above are my explorations for the front face of the app. We’ve done research to test which pattern would be the best for the homepage. We held an In-Depth Interview and Usability Test with our customers using all of these patterns.
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The result is quite predictable. The selected screen got an easy win mostly for the reason of the high familiarity level with OTA applications.

One more thing: Our team was a newborn with very few members back then. Moreover, those little numbers are split. We were working on two projects in parallel. Our actual composition for MySantika was only 1 Product Manager, 4 Engineers, 1 Designer, and interchangeably interns. There was not a lot of room for us to do a very wild exploration within the time constraint given. This condition often forced me to make a design decision that was pragmatically correct.

Every design decision must align with Indonesian users behaviour, Santika’s brand value, and most importantly, practically feasible to build.

C. Adaptive

Santika Indonesia Hotels & Resorts has extensive brands from two, three, four, five-star rated hotels and luxurious villas cater to the demand for upscale, mid and budget market business and leisure travelers.

However, little do Indonesians know that Santika is a hotel group chain. This is the problem that we wanted to be solved, MySantika should solve this misconception.

Every brand in this chain has its own unique brand in order to be aligned with their market. They speak a very different language.

MySantika, as an intermediary, needs to be:
1. Agnostic — Become neutral and unattached with only specific hotel brands.
2. Humble — MySantika’s brand can not be too bold. It should let hotel brands to be the spotlight in the app.

Below are some of my effort to incorporate adaptive principle:

From hotel brand detail pages above, I used a lot of white spaces to make it suitable (agnostic) with all hotel brand images. Also, I reserved a 3:2 banner image on top to let every brand show their unique brands (humble).