What Visiting a Sena Customer Taught Me
Why spending 4 hours at a hotel front desk in Lekki taught me more than 6 months of Figma designs.
“Software built from an armchair in an air-conditioned room breaks the moment it encounters the frontline operator.”
Last month I spent half a day at a 20-room boutique hotel in Lekki that recently switched to Sena. I sat on a stool behind the reception counter.
Within the first hour, two things became immediately clear:
First: the button we thought was obvious was completely hidden behind the hotel’s POS terminal monitor. The receptionist had to physically reach around to click it.
Second: guests do not want to fill out 8 form fields on their phone during check-in. They just arrived after two hours in Lagos traffic. They want to show a 4-digit code or QR code and get the room key immediately.
We went back to the office that night, deleted three complex setup screens, and created our one-tap Quick Arrival flow. The next morning, check-in time dropped from 7 minutes to 90 seconds.
Never trust an assumption you haven’t verified standing next to the person using your software.
“If your UI requires instruction manual reading, it is broken.”
Winner Oyekunle
Founder of Nile, Sena, and Booq. Documenting software building, distribution, and African enterprise realities from Lagos.