Nest Design Challenge

My Hotel with Marriott Rewards

9 min readMar 31, 2015

Many hotel chains have loyalty programs to reward travelers who routinely stay with them. With the advent of affordable home automation and streaming media, hotel rooms can be transformed into customizable environments which adapt to suit the preferences of their current occupant. Design a digital experience for a guest of such a hotel which will make them feel at home while away from home

This challenge was a great exercise in identifying assumptions and enforcing constraints. After analyzing the problem statement: “Design a digital experience for a guest of such a hotel which will make them feel at home while away from home” I wrote down some basic assumptions:

Does a guest who pays to stay in a hotel want to “feel at home”? There is a chance that their expectations are to stay in a hotel room that is better than their current home environment, to experience a luxurious or high tech environment.
The hotel experience for a person traveling alone is different than a couple traveling together. For this project I will choose to focus on the individual traveling by themselves.
There are multiple stakeholders in the making of a “Smart Hotel” experience: the hotel management, the staff, partnerships for the technology services provided, and the guests; they all play a part in this complex scenario. For this project, I will focus on the guest experience, with the assumption that they’ve taken their first steps to participate in the rewards program, namely downloading the hotel’s loyalty app.

I’m not currently a member of any hotel reward programs so I conducted a mini-online-research session to learn about the best rewards programs around. I discovered that Marriott topped out as one of the better programs based on customer reviews via some fancy Googling. I decided to ground my explorations around improving Marriott’s program.

Let’s imagine a story.

Marriott wants to pilot their new “My Hotel” program for Platinum Members. They’ve partnered with multiple connected device and streaming media vendors to create the ideal “Smart hotel room”. Marriott sends out an email to their Platinum Members encouraging them to link their home automation profiles (if they have any) to create the perfect “Home away from home”.

Mock for Marriott’s “Platinum Member’s My Hotel” service.

Developing a persona and identifying use-cases

I conducted a short interview with one of my close friends, Maggie, who worked for a large consulting company. They would frequently toss her in an airplane to roam around the country selling all sorts of “product”. Thanks to her frequent travels, she would spend anywhere from a few days, to an entire month living out of hotels.

I asked her a series of questions about her experience, but to give you the short of it, I could summarize it in two words: “Hated it.”

Hate’s a strong word, but it means there’s pain waiting to be found, so I gently probed her with questions, starting with her check-in experience. Given a disclaimer from her that she’s “definitely not a germaphobe, but…” what followed was an interesting “getting settled” ritual at each new hotel:

Maggie would check the bed to see if the sheets were clean, check the bathroom toilet to see if that was clean, and if the room smelled like smoke she would march right back downstairs and ask for another room.
Once those boxes were checked, she would unpack her clothes and place them in the drawers and place her toiletries in the bathroom.
What she said next stunned me, but hey, that’s the point of interviews — to learn things! Maggie mentioned that if she wanted to turn on the television, before she touched the remote, she would go to the bathroom, grab one of the plastic bags for ice and wrap the remote control in the plastic bag. Here’s why:

“There was this report on how the filthiest thing in a hotel room is the remote control Brittany… they found all types of bacteria and bodily fluids on it! Gross!”

Note taken.

The rest of the interview dug into what her ideal hotel room experience would be like and in what priority she would rank each feature. These were the following use cases:

The thermostat never works. The #1 question I always ask is “What is the temperature in the room right now?”
You never sleep as good in a hotel as you do in your own bed. A bed that is able to adjust based on your sleeping patterns, maybe even hot/cold control. Sleep number would be awesome.
Smart lights, that come on when you open the door or walk into a room. Loves the idea of having a dimming timer that helps signal it’s time to go to bed, and then brighten when it’s time to wake up in the morning.
The ability to control the blinds/curtains in the same way as the lights.
Music, that you can control from your own music player or playlists. Would be cool to have music in the bathroom.

Those were the top five, but over all when I asked her to describe her ideal hotel experience she said:

“The room should feel more expensive than you could afford, like really nice sheets and Crate and Barrel furniture, but makes you super comfortable.”

After this interview I created the following Persona:

Maggie D. - Consultant, 25 years old, travels weekly to Washington DC for large consulting firm, stays by herself. Loves to do Crossfit in the mornings. Has a Nest Thermostat at home and multiple Belkin Wemo smart switches that have timers for 11PM sleep time and 6AM wake time.

Maggie is an early adopter, she was excited to participate in the new Smart Room, “My Hotel” pilot with Marriott. She has an iPhone 5s with fingerprint Touch ID. Maggie likes to use technology to keep her healthy habits and routine in check.

I created a “typical travel routine” that looks like the following:

4pm- Maggie lands in DC, takes an Uber to the Marriott, on her way there is notified to check in through the Marriott mobile app. She checks-in and uses the new “fingerprint Touch ID” key entry feature to enter her room. The lights turn on as she enters the room and she turns on the last song she was listening to as she goes about “settling in”.
6pm-8pm- Dinner with a friend
8pm- back to the room, excited to continue watching House of Cards on Netflix.
11pm- lights dim and she prepares for bed. Maggie adjusts the bed firmness til she’s comfortable and drifts to sleep.
11:30pm-6:00am- sleeps until she is woken by the lights slowly brightening and her radio playing softly.
6am-7am- Maggie does her CrossFit workout and comes back to her room to shower. When she turns the shower on the heated towel rack warms her towel, the coffee machine turns on to make her morning coffee, and the weather channel turns on to show that days weather forecast to help her pick out her clothes for the day.
8am-6pm- Maggie works on-site with her clients
7pm- Returns to her hotel room, wants to relax and unwind while reading her email and catching up on the latest Facebook posts from her friends.
9pm- Maggie feels like watching something on Netflix, browses for a romantic comedy and watches until the lights dim at 11pm.

Sketching Explorations

I decided to focus on a mobile digital experience. I wanted to experiment with your phone as both the key card to your room, and your remote control to a personalized room.

Since most mobile devices have GPS/bluetooth it would be interesting to experiment with spatial context: as Maggie is arrives at the Marriott she is prompted to check-in ; when she’s in the room, the remote interface is the app’s home screen.

I chose to work through the following flow:

Home/Profile page > Check-in > Room Key (Touch ID) > Remote Control > Lighting Settings

Profile, Check-in, and Room Key flow

I referenced the original Marriott Rewards app for the profile page. I liked how they used a picture of the actual hotel as the background. The main focus of this screen is to encourage the user to check-in. I purposely placed the check-in button on the bottom of the screen in easy striking area for your thumb.

For the Check-in page, I wanted to encourage the user to use the “Thumbprint ID” check in, but I also made sure to include a fall-back option to “Check-in at the front desk” for users who are comfortable with a more traditional interaction.

For the Room Key, I provided a similar traditional fall back interaction to “grab a key at the front desk”.

The Remote Control

I was torn between two ideas I sketched out of different layouts for this screen. Recalling my brief interview above, how the Thermostat was the #1 item that caused the most pain, I decided to reserve top-shelf-space for that information. And, as a counter balance, I displayed the current local weather on the opposite corner.

The next feature I highlighted was the streaming media interaction. I wanted to set the mood and create an atmosphere that felt more like home. What better way to say “welcome home” than to spool up a person’s last song/playlist or Netflix series?

Rules and Timers are important to keeping your habits, especially for going to sleep or waking up. If the user has any rules or timers, it’ll show up front-and-center.

Side Note: At some point in my exploration I also toyed with the idea of having a “Room Service” button on the top right in the title bar. Not necessarily a part of the “Smart Room” experience but definitely a part of the “My Hotel” experience. Make it easy for the guest to preview the menu and order something up to the room, or even request a ironing board or new shampoo. The goal was to lower the barrier of getting what you want; some feel uncomfortable picking up the hotel phone to communicate with the hotel staff, so controls in-app might solve this.

Lighting Controls

The overall info arch. for this screen was complex, but I found simplicity in the end. At first I tried listing out all the lights in a row with just a name and a switch. Then I realized that it would be helpful to group them by the room that they are in. Which led me to question if it would be better to allow the user to turn on “all lights” for a particular room, save them a couple of clicks ☺

Feedback loops are important, an I wondered “what confirmation would they get once they pushed the button to turn a light on/off?” I found that interestingly enough, while an interface element (like a switch toggled on or off) might make sense, the strongest success indicator would be the actual light turning on or off.

Prototype

I get so excited when I hop into Sketch App and begin to see my sketches take shape. But I get even more excited when I throw my mockups into inVision and link them together to play with the initial flow I imagined. There is nothing quite like playing with the app and actually experiencing the flow.

Try it out for yourself: http://invis.io/XE2KT5VBK