The end-users, myself and another guest that we are going to call Rob, were staying in 2 hotel rooms in a London hotel. Neither of the hairdryers in our rooms worked properly, and they were attached to the wall.

Rob’s reaction: “It’s fine, I’ll make do without using a hairdryer during my stay”. My reaction: When I went to breakfast I let the staff members know I needed a hairdryer. They had one delivered to my room, while I was eating breakfast. Problem solved.

Later that day I read on the hotel room brochure on my desk, about the services provided, something like “there is a tea/coffee machine at every floor, and a closet where there are ironing boards and additional hairdryers available.”

That last part made me feel like they (the product owners and/or developers) knew more than one of their hairdryers were faulty but instead of replacing them (higher investment of time/money/effort), they provided instructions on how to solve the problem, a workaround: “go get another one at the end of the corridor.”

Except this information was not highly visible and available when I needed it. The text was not in the context where the error happened. The message to help solve my issue was not next to the hairdryer on the wall.

I had to ask a staff member (the developers) who basically made a change in the backend for me to remove the error that was happening in the UI, and I found a hairdryer on my bed later.

In your opinion, was this a good strategy to tackle the broken hairdryer issue? What would have been an alternative/better solution?

Let’s not forget about the user Rob who didn’t say anything and dealt with the broken feature and had a less-than-ideal experience overall, and nobody will ever know. But he may stop using the app… as in staying in a different hotel next time, maybe.