Modernizing Activity Schedule Management for Haven Parks

Year

2024-2025

Industry

Hospitality, Travel, Service

Client

Haven Holidays

My role

Product Designer (Full-time)

Context

Haven operates 40+ holiday parks serving over 4 million annual guests.

I was part of the team that led an overhaul of the internal activity management system. By moving from a manual, spreadsheet-based workflow to a centralized schedule templating system, we reduced operational workload from weeks to hours and eliminated critical scheduling errors.

UX Consulting

Service Design

UI Design

Workshop Facilitation

Design QA

Design Tokens

Holistic Approach

I was responsible for designing a feature that serviced both admin and ground staff facing tools as well as impacting the guest app and web experience. This meant that a holistic service design approach was paramount.

Spreadsheet Nightmare

Current tools failed to show multiple attractions in the same full-week view, forcing managers to plan in Excel. Consequently, they had to manually re-enter thousands of session slots one by one, when setting up the upcoming season. The new scheduling solution had to be designed for integration with the legacy internal calendar system with 100+ active park admins.

Navigating Constraints

I navigated strict backend limitations and a 3-month deadline to build a foundational MVP. By reusing existing components and prioritizing core UX, I aligned design feasibility with engineering and time constraints, accepting calculated tradeoffs. I prepared an iterative plan for future improvements in combination with staff feedback.

New Way to Schedule

To solve this I shifted the user mental model from Data Entry to Pattern Management. Instead of entering 90 days of events manually, managers create templates and populate the peak schedules with one click. Overall, this reduced seasonal planning overhead by 90%.

Holistic Approach

Spreadsheet Nightmare

Navigating Constraints

New Way to Schedule

Why not Google Calendar?

The goal was to build upon the internal system already in place.
A unique database of thousands of specific park activities that standard calendars aren't built for.
Avoiding the high overhead and development time required for third-party API synchronization.
A strict three-month deadline favored an internal build over complex external integration.

The final MVP uses familiar scheduling patterns to keep things intuitive while resolving the usability issues of the legacy system.

Template creation showcase

Scheduling tasks that took weeks were reduced to hours.

Feedback from Staff:

“Just wanted to say the delete all function in templates. Bloody brilliant! Just saved me a lot of time from fudge up I made!”

“I’ve been with the team at <...> this week and they brought to life for me how much better their world is because of the work you’ve delivered on the Activity Planning Process."

“I have uploaded all the first weekends with no issues! Very quick!"

Back

Old vs. New: a side-by-side comparison.

Betono Mozaika

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