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Hospitality is a powerful notion that is at the center of creating delightful user experiences. As a designer who’s worked with clients across a range of industries, I know firsthand the value hospitality can unlock on digital, and I’ll explain how to do that below.

Before getting started, let me explain what I mean by hospitality. As Danny Meyer writes in his book “Setting the Table,” there’s a distinction between service and hospitality. Service is simply the act of delivering the product, a monologue of sorts, where we dictate to a customer how to do things. Hospitality, on the other hand, looks at how the delivery of our service or product makes the recipient feel — it’s a dialogue. This thinking is at the center of how we approach design and how we build digital products at Monstarlab, from standalone apps and websites to end-to-end digital ecosystems.

One of my focuses at Monstarlab is the application of these philosophies and methodologies to improving the customer experience in digital and physical spaces, including restaurants, retail shops and gyms. There’s a lot that brands can do to create value in this area. And today I want to share what your teams can start doing right now — digital applications of hospitality that everyone who works in the hospitality industry can start adopting.

1. Practice empathy for guests

Thinking of our customers and users as guests are one way to bring hospitality into digital and physical spaces. Hospitality is all about how our guests feel. In digital we express this by constantly doing user research. Getting started with this can appear daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. The trick is to jump in and find ways to make learning from customers a regular part of your process. In product development, we organize what we call “User Fridays”: every Friday we have a customer visit our office to interview them and present one thing we’re working on to get feedback.

Every Friday we have a customer visit our office to interview them and present one thing we’re working on.

For physical spaces, another quick research tactic is to invite a friend or colleague to visit the store and talk openly about their impressions while you shadow them.

Or simply experience the service yourself. Complete an online purchase and document your experience. If the service or products are too expensive, you can always return them and you get to experience that part of the customer journey too!

2. Practice empathy for each other

Danny Meyer defined “enlightened hospitality” as putting hospitality to work to serve employees first, then our guests, and finally the business. With every project at Monstarlab, we examine the perspective of all employees. We do that not just by talking to employees, but by working side by side with them. This takes the form of training as employees and working shifts, whether as cooks and expeditors at Shake Shack, or front-desk attendants at Blink.

The Monstarlab team took shifts at Shake Shack to empathize with employees and understand their journey.

As Meyer explains, by putting the employees and their hospitality first, the business and bottom-line benefits as a result.

If you work in physical stores, every day is a good opportunity to examine the steps and tasks you and your colleagues take to deliver service to your guests. This can help you identify the moments of friction and brainstorm how to overcome the challenges that stand in the way of offering better, more hospitable service.

3. Use simple language

Designing for the web has taught me the importance of simple language. How do your guests actually refer to things? Most of us spend a lot of our time crafting transactional copy, and our goal is to make complex tasks feel simple.

To simplify our language, when relaunching a loyalty program we used simple google search for most common tasks on google.

In physical spaces, trying to understand branded terms, which are often fancier than necessary, can feel very intimidating. Think about how you can simplify the language so that every client and guest feel welcomed. One way to accomplish this is to do an audit on social media and review sites of the most common requests for your brand. You will uncover user-generated content that can help you empathize with the frustrations of your customers. Do you have an analytics team? You can ask them to provide a report on the most common search words on your website. You can use that to inform any sales

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