A Marriott platform for: check-ins, integrated guest requests, smart search, and more.
1.) How might we make hospitality management effective, seamless, and intuitive for Marriott staff?
2.) How might we enable Marriott guests to feel an 11 star experience?
3.) How might we create cohesion across the Marriott hospitality staff?
We started on the project by interviewing Marriott staff. This process allowed us to understand various pain-points across the process of checking guests in, and ensuring that their hotel visit was top of the line no matter the situation.
This was critical to making sure we solve the right problems and meet the expectations of Marriott as a business.
When making Aurora, our UX research with receptionists showed that Marriott staff worked in an extremely non-linear fashion. This meant we had to create a system of modular interactions, rather than depending on traditional linear interactions and journey maps. By leveraging systems based thinking and service design we defined 3 principles that encompassed Aurora's workflow as a whole.
Aurora needed to be made from building blocks of systems to achieve true productivity
Aurora needed to perform at the speed of a Marriott staff member. Speedy and thorough, with an emphasis on hotel guests.
Aurora needed to be able to assist staff in finding everything from complex hotel reporting to guest birthdays in seconds.
We iterated upon these themes leveraging Adobe XD prototypes and by continuously meeting with Marriott senior stakeholders. This came with it's own set of challenges, as every stakeholder had their own set of needs when it came to representing their core users across management, reception, housekeeping, and maintenance.
By consistently making meaningful changes for each user type and validating that our system was useful to our core users, we were able to make Aurora the 11 star experience that everyone needed.
A smart search feature within the dashboard that provides instant access to guest details like status, room, and reservation information. Drawing on insights from Marriott receptionists, this feature displays essential data at a glance. With fluid interaction design, modular placement, and customizable hotkeys, users enjoy seamless and persistent access to vital information.
A gamified system for Marriott staff career growth that recognizes and rewards great service. The career profile drawer offers a concise view of each staff member’s career path and successful case streak. By showcasing success metrics and allowing staff to save career points for rewards, this feature incentivizes performance and provides a valuable metric system for property management.
A feature to replace sticky notes for Marriott staff by embedding important information directly into the system. Staff can move digital notes anywhere on the dashboard, providing a fluid, modular, and personalized experience. This ensures clean workspaces, enhances scalability and security, and keeps notes individualized to each staff member’s user profile, preventing confusion in shared workspaces.
A gifting interface for Marriott staff to surprise and delight guests effortlessly. The quick gift panel seamlessly pops out from the side of the guest profile, enabling staff to easily award rewards points, drinks, and other vouchers. This feature provides a simple yet powerful way to enhance guest satisfaction and create memorable stays.
A quick case and messaging interface to streamline collaboration among Marriott staff. By visiting a guest’s profile, staff can see key actions like room inspections before arrival. The quick case interface allows staff to request actions from team members, such as housekeeping, and provide brief context in a pop-out panel beside the guest profile. These cases are then sent to the designated case owner and integrated into a chat system, fostering asynchronous collaboration and seamless workflows. This new system offers a significant improvement over the previous case structure by enhancing detail, notifications, and overall efficiency.
A system that makes changing rooms for guests a breeze. With just a few taps in the side panel, Marriott staff can easily select a new room based on availability within the property. This system allows for quick reassignment when a room isn’t ready or offers an effortless way to upgrade a guest’s room. Once a room is assigned, staff can print the room keys immediately, transforming what was once a painstaking process into a seamless experience, greatly improving the guest’s experience and efficiency for the hotel staff.