Two years ago, I wrote a post What UX and Airports Have in Common based on my travel experience. In this sequel, following a recent road trip around West Oregon, I continue learning from the hospitality industry.
In the post-pandemic era, most hotels have ditched tiny plastic shampoo bottles in favor of large, wall-mounted dispensers. It’s better for the environment and more convenient for guests—you get as much shampoo as you need for longer stays.
On our trip, we stayed at a different hotel almost every night and encountered a variety of dispenser designs. Most of them worked just fine, meaning you could use them without giving it much thought. But some stood out for the wrong reasons.
UI 101
Respectable hotels usually offer three dispensers: shampoo, conditioner, and body wash. But telling them apart can be tricky when the labels are in tiny fonts and questionable color choices. People don’t wear glasses in the shower – and even with perfect vision trying to read pale green text on a slightly less pale green background in a foggy bathroom is a challenge.
Good in Theory, Bad in Practice
Some hotel chains are swapping pump dispensers for upside-down squeeze bottles. This sounds like a great idea at first: let gravity do its job and help use up all the product. But in practice, it doesn’t work well in the wet and slippery shower environment.
It also requires “user training” in form of a “squeeze gently” message (because otherwise it dispenses copious amounts of product) and hard plastic is not user-friendly for people with arthritis, for example.
Location, Location, Location
At one hotel, the dispensers were mounted directly under the showerhead. This meant you either had to turn off the water to use them, or awkwardly reach through the spray while trying not to lose your shampoo mid-transit.
This puzzled me and I wondered if this placement may have created some cleaning and refilling convenience for the housekeeping staff. In software design, we also frequently need to consider different groups of users that may have different ideas and needs. But with three shower walls to choose from, it shouldn’t be that hard to find a location that works for both guests and cleaning staff.
How does this relate to enterprise software?
Software design decisions are rarely perfect, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make the best decision possible.
The common thread in all these hotel examples? The people making the decisions were clearly far removed from those using the products daily. Unfortunately, the same happens in the world of enterprise software – especially in SAP.
The customers of such software (“business users”, as we call them in SAP world) have important daily jobs and when software is built for them, there is a tendency to not disrupt their work. To “bother” them as little as possible. This results in the business users being represented by an SME (“subject matter expert”) or, worse, by a random person who happened to be available.
The Hotel Shampoo Dispenser Selection Committee
Would the Hotel Shampoo Dispenser Selection Committee think of mentioning that the shampoo label should be readable? Probably not. It seems too obvious. But the person designing the bottle was focused on aesthetics and manufacturing cost – not legibility in a steamy shower.
When enterprise software reaches a certain stage in the development cycle, it becomes quite difficult to modify, just like changing a shampoo bottle design after an order has been placed. And that’s why it’s important to get input from many people and think about the specific environment where the product (software, in this case) would be used.
The ideal Committee would listen to everyone – hotel staff, frequent travelers, families, seniors. And most importantly, it wouldn’t just follow whoever screams the loudest.
Other Mindset Experts Weigh In
But don’t just listen to me, hear what other amazing experts have to say on the subject!
“Design Thinking helps us get to the right solution faster by talking to end users, understanding constraints, and testing ideas early. When teams skip this step, they struggle with low adoption, high maintenance costs, or products that just miss the mark. But when users, business, and IT come together to take this human-centered approach from the start, we build smarter, ship faster, and deliver real value.”
– Sab Cheung, Principal UX Designer @ Mindset
“Successful transformation is less about technology itself and more about orchestrating how people, processes, and systems evolve together. Enterprise software are powerful enablers, but without anchoring change in human experience, they risk becoming just another system. When innovation is led with empathy and grounded in how work truly happens, technology becomes a catalyst for progress—not an obstacle.”
– Dr. Niz Safrudin, Innovation Strategist @ Mindset
