Dooleys discovery

Dooleys has several social and leisure clubs located in Sydney, Australia. The business consists of four main casinos, and a gym, cafes, and restaurants.

Length of project: 4 weeks
Role: UX Researcher
Tools: Figma, Notion & Zoom
Team: 2 Engineers, PM and Director of Marketing

Problem

The service providers and managers of Dooleys faced the challenge of a decentralized and nonautomated system that demands a critical amount of labour and time.

The decentralized system and the unknown quantifiable data on the behaviour, motivation, and needs of the different member groups (frequent and occasional members) and it is prominent demographic (seniors) affected membership processes, communication, booking, and engagement.

Goals

  • To integrate systems to obtain centralized data to make decisions that will ensure business relevance, a stronger competitive edge, and to gain a bigger-picture understanding.

  • To increase ROI of marketing efforts.

  • To automate and make things easier for members and employees, specifically for membership joining, renewals, offers, promotions, feedback, surveys, and booking.

  • To generate more engagement and effective interaction and communication between members via all platforms.

  • To save on time and labour.

  • To better manage and track budget, expenses, and members’ responses using centralized and integrated data.

Types of Users

Three main types of users were identified for this research:

Regular members
10,000 to 15,000

Occasional members
aprox. 65,000

Employees

Due to the project's tight timeline and our focus on seniors as primary users, we pivoted from more traditional user interviews to desk research. While stakeholder discussions revealed challenges in recruiting and conducting online interviews with our senior demographic, who generally had limited technology experience, we found an alternative. By interviewing employees who maintained regular contact with customers, we leveraged their understanding of user needs.

DESK RESEARCH
seniors & technology

Users ages 65 and older face unique challenges when using websites and apps. Even though digital literacy increases among seniors, designs must accommodate aging users. A study conducted by the Pew Research Institute in 2019 found that 73% of people over 65 were connected to the internet (United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan in almost two decades).


Seniors use the Internet mainly to pursue their interests, follow current events, manage money, shop, learn about topics, and stay in touch with friends and family. That shows how the internet has positively impacted their lives.


Also, smartphone adoption is growing fast among seniors; the study showed that from 2011 to 2016, smartphone ownership quadrupled among this demographic.
They use their phone to track events, research information, enjoy hobbies, and stay connected with loved ones.


Social media is mainly used to stay in touch with friends and family. They prefer to browse through social media accounts and rarely share content. The most shared content was interesting to them, visually pleasing, or highly accessible content.

PRIMARY RESEARCH WITH EMPLOYEEs

I conducted semi-structured user interviews with frontline employees who deal with the membership process and work at the biggest casino/restaurant location, the gym, and part of the communication team.

General pain points for employees are:

  • Duplicity of tasks

  • Some roles have ambiguous tasks

  • Fragmented communication between employees, in many cases, not having a centralized point of reference to go to

  • Collecting data manually

  • Time management: employees are busy, and clients need attention, but the staff is reduced sometimes.

  • Fragmented data

MEMBERSHIP insights

These membership insights came from employees working directly with customers at the main venue of the casinos/restaurants.

General Findings

  • Some members are reluctant to become a member

  • Some new members don’t know how to fill out the form completely

  • Operators get asked why they need so much information from the customer

  • It feels awkward when a new client is standing in front of an operator when filling out their form.



    Procedural issues

  • There is no digital verification process.

  • Due to so many operators, information can be mistaken

  • Operators need a valid ID of the user due to legal reasons.

  • Not clear how to deactivate a member card when someone loses them

  • The membership process is very lengthy and manual

  • Many steps to renewing a membership

Member retention

  • Members have language barriers

  • The renewal process is too long

  • The primary source of information comes through direct interaction with staff instead of mono-directional communication channels.




    Onboarding

  • New employees struggle with membership joining and renewal

  • The current system, ebet, has a steep learning curve for new employees

  • Joining members don’t fill out the complete form




    Bookings

  • Manually entering data into a spreadsheet
    Get event bookings over the phone and website.

  • Cannot book seats for events: Seat booking is unclear and done through comments and spreadsheets.

  • Restaurant booking on spreadsheets
    Functions booking (birthdays, corporate events) have their software and payments over the phone.

  • There is no information about function packages on the website.

Insights HEALTH & FITNESS

  • Night times are especially busy for the treadmills.

  • We constantly have to encourage them to fill up classes to prevent congestion

  • Frequently we need to explain the contract, and they forget

  • We have to call the other venue when we want to ask about a member file

  • We have a separate database

  • At night, we get congestion on the gym floor, and we need to encourage them to take classes upstairs and avoid congestion.

  • Overdue payments are tedious to do

  • Some members don't know how to give 30 days cancellation notice. That is a complicated conversation for both.

  • Covid- related problems.

Payments
Overdue payments are complicated to follow up with

Communication
Online confusing ways of communication with members

Insights COMMUNICATION

Feedback/ Social media interactions.

  • Response times are too long (the social media team has to ask the department first)

  • The marketing team has to interact with members regarding events.

  • Most of the marketing material is in plain English, making it difficult to reach out to ESL members.

  • Not a sufficient database for effective marketing campaigns

  • Not enough presence on social media

  • No system to identify trends from feedback or complaints

  • Fragmented communication with other departments

  • The complaint processes coming in through social media are lengthy.

CURRENT PROCESSES

Based on the interviews I developed a diagram with all the current processes, tools and software used, and identified the pain points and needs of each process.

BLUEPRINT

Through interviews and process analysis, I created a simplified service blueprint to communicate the findings with the client.

At the backstage of this framework are the processes and management opportunities that must be addressed. These are critical for Dooley to reach their business goals and can be done through service design. The front stage represents the information and tools visible to the members, which can be resolved via UX design and ensure enjoyable and usable service interfaces. To do so, further user/ member research needs to be done.

IMPACT

The research and service design efforts established a solid foundation to address Dooleys' business goals, including integration, automation, member engagement, and operational efficiency. These deliverables enabled stakeholders, team leads, and managers to gain a clear understanding of the challenges and the needs of both members and employees. The documentation became an essential reference for identifying pain points and mapping the current processes.

As a direct outcome of this project, stakeholders approved the budget for the technology director to proceed to the next phase. This next step involved UX designers creating centralized applications to streamline and optimize operations.

Learnings

I had the opportunity to collaborate with a large organization facing a complex challenge within a tight timeframe, across different cultures and time zones. The kickoff meeting was crucial in determining the best approach for the research, allowing me to quickly develop and organize a research plan.

During the analysis phase, I uncovered how the company's rapid growth had led to the implementation of multiple software systems and duplication of tasks. This impacted both the organizational design and the technological architecture, ultimately affecting the customer experience as well.

This experience reinforced the importance of placing people at the center of the design process and adopting a holistic approach to problem-solving.