Turning Vibes into Value: UXR Strategies for Hospitality on a Budget
A data-driven approach to the intangible elements of service and hospitality
What is Mondae Morning?
Each week, I explore how research, marketing, and design influence what we buy, use, and believe (particularly in the worlds of health + wellness, tech, and wearable devices). With a background in UX research and public health, I share insights at the intersection of behavior, branding, and trust.
This newsletter is part commentary, part case study, but more importantly, a space to think out loud about the products shaping modern life, and the systems behind them.
For curious readers, researchers, and anyone designing for real people.
Welcome to my first paid subscription post. Moving forward, these paywall posts will complement the free Mondae Mornings newsletter, which will continue to land in your inbox each week as usual. Exact release schedule is TBD. I will be trialing posts 2x per month for paid articles to see if I can maintain consistency (and will adjust from there).
Paid posts will follow a simple structure:
✨ Everyone gets the setup. Each post opens with a story, scene-setter, or cultural observation, something to spark your thinking and invite you in, whether you're a subscriber or not.
🔒 Paid posts go deeper, delivering sharp insights, research-backed takeaways, and frameworks you can apply right away, especially valuable for UX researchers, brand strategists, and founders designing intentional experiences. This section will be all about practical application.
This format ideally keeps the Monday energy flowing freely, while offering more tactical value for those building (or rebuilding) with care.
Want the value but not the price tag? Get sponsored:
🔗 How to ask your employer to pay for a Mondae Morning subscription
Table of Contents for This Week’s Post:
☕️ Introductory Thoughts
On UX research in hospitality and service industries
👯♀️ Industry Alignment
Where tech and hospitality naturally overlap within user-centered design
⚠️ Where They Differ
Why tech assumptions don’t always translate
📖 Practical Application (paid)
4 low-lift ways to apply UX research principles in hospitality settings
🤓Hospitality Insights Starter Kit (paid)
In-the-moment questions designed to capture real-time guest sentiment with minimal budget and maximum impact.
📝 Key Takeaways for Brand Builders (paid)
Simple shifts to start seeing your space through users’ eyes
💭 Final Thoughts (paid)
Reflections on bringing UX outside the screen and into the dining room
Hospitality is built on the invisible. Intangible events of a warm welcome, the vibe of a room, and the rhythm of service. These events are a feeling that guests remember, but they’re also hardest to measure replicate and scale.
In an industry where margins are tight and expectations are high, how can restaurants and hotels capture these fleeting moments and turn them into something actionable? Enter UXR (or user-centered research). Borrowed from the tech industry, UXR offers boutique hospitality brands a toolkit for designing better experiences, even without the enterprise-level budgets.
Where There’s Alignment:
Real Time Feedback Loops & Iteration: in tech and hospitality, success depends on how fast you can learn and adapt, then execute. In the startup world it’s about A/B testing a feature or redesigning a flow. In hospitality, it’s how a server adjusts their tone based on a guests mood, or how a restaurant tweaks its playlist and lighting to achieve the perfect quiet Tuesday night. Intercept research (quick, context check-ins with real users or guests) works especially well in both settings. Whether it’s post-meal feedback or a short in-stay survey, these lightweight interactions give teams live data that’s closer to how people actually behave, not just what they say they want.
Fast Judgement & First Impressions Matter: both industries hinge on snap decisions - does the homepage load fast enough? Does the entryway feel welcoming? Guests and users alike form opinions within seconds of interaction with your brand and those initial impressions are hard to reverse. UX Research has long focused on optimizing that first interaction and hospitality can borrow that same rigor. For example, gathering immediate feedback on check-in experience or first-night stays gives teams the visibility into friction points, allowing for quick fixes before negative reviews hit after check-out.
Service is a Journey: both tech and hospitality rely on seamlessly linked touch-points to create a coherent experience. Just as a user’s journey through an app might span onboarding, tutorials, and daily use, a guest's journey in a restaurant or hotel includes booking, arrival, the core experience, and post-visit follow-up. UXR in hospitality can map emotional highs and friction points across customer touch-points, revealing where the vibe breaks down. By tracking the entire experience (as opposed to isolated moments) teams can uncover patterns and design for flow. Journey mapping turns scattered, one-off feedback into strategy, helping staff anticipate needs before they’re verbalized.
Where Things Differ:
The Power of the Soft Launch: in hospitality you get something tech rarely does. Soft launches aren’t simply a dress rehearsal, it’s a full-on live environment to test how your concept holds up in the wild. Unlike a new app feature that needs to work perfectly at scale from day one, a restaurant or hotel can quietly open its doors, gather early feedback, and fine-tune everything from lighting temperature to the tone of a hosts greeting. Sure, tech does this with UX research ahead of launches, but the studied users are rarely an actual paying customer. This is where design intent match becomes critical. Does the space feel as warm and minimal as intended, or does it tip into sterile and uninviting? Perception gaps are hard to see from the inside and nearly impossible to measure without live, qualitative observation. Hospitality teams can use a soft launch to gather nuanced, in-situation insights that go beyond functionality and into feeling, something tech products don’t often get to test in the same way.
Physical Environment Variables are Always in Play: tech rarely contends with sound, scent, and lighting nuances. Hospitality experiences are affected by dozens of uncontrolled variables: ambient noise levels, the scent of a new floral arrangement, even the weather outside. These elements dramatically shape guest perceptions but often go unnoticed in traditional feedback loops. A perfectly executed service moment might feel off to the customer simply because the space was too echoey or dark (ever watch someone use their phone flashlight to read a menu?) In hospitality UXR, the environment is part of the interface and needs to be observed tested and iterated just like a feature in a product.
Emotional Nuance vs. Functionality Utility: tech is often judged by how well they work, is it fast and seamless. Meanwhile hospitality experiences live and die by how they make people feel. A slightly chaotic restaurant can still earn rave reviews if the energy is right. You aren’t optimizing for usability alone, you’re also tuning for tone. Reading between the lines of body language, conversational cadence and subtle aesthetic cues means qualitative research shines in this context. Traditional CSAT (customer satisfaction) surveys may not be sensitive enough to pick up on atmospheric variables.
Practical Application: 4 Low-Lift Ways to Apply UXR Today
Here’s where I part ways with my free subscribers. The next section covers 4 simple, actionable ways to start applying UX research principles immediately, ideal for marketers, product folks, and small teams. If that sounds useful, you can unlock it below.
Keep Reading:
📌 Read more thoughtfully created articles here
🔗 How to ask your employer to pay for a Mondae Morning subscription
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Mondae Mornings to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.