Marriott Six Degrees
OBJECTIVE: work together with MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Marriott Hotels to build a branded innovative lobby experience for their "Travel Brilliantly" Campaign.
OUTCOME: Multi touch point experience geared towards business travelers looking to network and socialize through an event-based platform.
KEY INSIGHTS: Testing and research showed the importance of indirect connections, privacy and the power of shared interests and alma maters.
ROLE: “Interaction Designer” with MIT Mobile Experience Lab. At MIT Mobile Experience lab, we use Design Thinking to pitch and create innovative experiences for our client. My role as an interaction designer was both to build research content and to design.
- Research through competitive analysis and contextual inquiry
- Synthesis through journey mapping and building personas
- Lead designer for mobile app design and Information Architecture of event platform driving the interactive touch points.
Research
For this Marriott project we started with a wealth of research done previously by students in a Design Thinking course held at MIT. Our job was to use all previous projects and draw together the core trends and patterns that emerged across them using Affinity Mapping and Trend Mapping. The results were the following 4 themes:
- Micro-communities within the hotel
- Connections to the local city
- Spontaneous events or chance meetings
- Signature Showcase item
We also landed on one main proto-persona, the FREQUENT BUSINESS TRAVELER, which we would iterate and refine as we built prototypes and tested. The main pain points & motivations of our persona were:
- Staying in their hotel room is common when traveling for business, but it could get lonely and tiresome
- Meeting new people as FEMALE travelers is especially difficult due to issues of safety and privacy
- Frequent travelers often run into the same people at different cities
Synthesis
After narrowing down on our main themes, we held sessions together as a team to ideate and sketch out a handful of concepts that would incorporate one or more of the themes. As one of the interaction designers I built storyboards to communicate the overall scope of each concept to our client.
Design- storyboards
"Six Degrees" was decided as the final concept as it aligned most with the client's goals and brand. The concept would incorporate all four themes– micro-communities within the hotel, connections to the local city, spontaneous meetings, and a signature showcase item. The “Six Degrees” concept aimed to connect frequent business travelers who share interests or are in the same academic or professional social network. Guests that chose to join the network could find connections with similar guests at the hotel via shared interests or degrees of connections. In order to create a meeting point within the lobby, we brainstormed ambient to direct ways of visualizing connections and converged on the idea of a table as a proof of concept. We also came up with the idea to use hotel curated events driven by common interests of the current guests staying at the hotel as the last piece of the experience. The goal was to drive interaction outside of the app, display, and table in a meaningful and connected way.
In order to illustrate how the different points of the experience tied together, I refined the storyboard with icons showing the different device potential used through the system.
Design- wireframes
The Six Degrees mobile app was architected to handle all the different elements of the experience: the app, the display and the interactive table. In our first iteration we experimented with allowing all major social networks be used as a means of connecting. In order to build a network of shared interests and connections, the onboarding flow of the app would need to be intuitive for business travelers. Keeping our proto-persona of a business traveler in mind, we attempted to create a clear flow that would encourage inputting information while still keeping it optional.
Next it was important to communicate that the network was an event based platform and drive app interaction through event browsing. As we learned during our research phase, making connections and finding more convenient ways of exploring the local neighborhood were key motivations to leaving their hotel rooms.
I created a SITEMAP of the app to show the flows and architecture of the system.
Testing
After building the first prototype, the team tested the app, display, and table concept at the local Cambridge Marriott hotel lobby. We recorded candid INTERVIEWS with some of the participants of the test session and narrowed down on common themes. What we learned was that LinkedIn was by far the preferred means of connecting through the app. We also confirmed that female travelers felt especially burdened by the idea of connecting through an app, for fear that it would become a hookup app. This all pointed to a need of professional interaction and increased privacy.
After testing our first prototype we went on to iterate on the table, display and mobile app to build the final designs for Six Degrees which you can see here.
Conclusion
Overall this project was an exercise in Design Thinking, Research, and UX Design. I felt that the process was ideal for building innovative ideas that extended beyond our digital interactions. I was able to build on my skills of journey mapping and mobile UX design and work with an incredibly multidisciplinary group of teammates. I also learned some of the soft skills of working with clients and the hard skill of building presentations and decks.