UX Research Case Study: Marriott

Marriott Hotel in Dubai from Unsplash

About

Marriott is an international brand that has hotels and resorts from all over the world. Marriott’s goal is to expand the world and open more opportunities for providing unique guest experiences. It is continuing to establish innovation, enhancing strong sustainability, and improving diversity.

Problems

Marriott’s main goal within the digital properties is to increase customer traffic and retargeting on websites and mobile apps. There should be a way to identify the pain points that customers were currently facing while booking a hotel room and using the loyalty program. It would sustain a sturdy increase in customer traffic.

Approach

Picture of User Research Methods from the Marriott Report

UX Research was one of the UX Design methods used to help identify the user’s pain points, experiences, and highlights of Marriott’s digital properties. The benefits of UX Research were:

• Encouraging the drive of the redesign for the Marriott’s Digital Properties
• Understand user’s needs and wants for a particular product or service

There were two user research methods I used to learn about the user’s experience on Marriott’s website.

• Interviews: Learn about the user’s current or past experience and stories behind Marriott Hotels and digital properties.
• Usability Tests: identify the user’s interaction issues occurring while interacting with the Marriott website. There was also an experience walk-through with the Marriott mobile app.

Results

TV and Remote designed on Sketch

There were four participants with experience using Marriott Hotels involved in the interviews and the Usability tests.

Participant Descriptions created on Adobe XD

Here were the crucial issues that I discovered while the participants were interacting with Marriott’s booking website.

• Unable to find the price sorting filter
• Difficulty finding the currency exchange rate while searching for rooms
• No automated process when booking a room each time

Experience Walk Through on Marriott mobile app

• It was tedious to book and customize a room on mobile.
• Unable to click on the specific date range on the calendar
• Difficult to use the explore the destination feature

Here is a YouTube video on the highlights from the interviews. See the report for more information.

Lessons Learned

The case study was a pleasurable experience to go through for UX Research. I was excited about the topic because I had extensive experience in traveling all over the world with Marriott Hotels. It was interesting to discover how the participants were going through the booking process on the Marriott website. There was a constraint I experienced during the project. I was new to doing data synthesis took a while to figure out the theme groupings. The key takeaway from the project was to prepare interview studies ahead of time. Therefore, you should test out the equipment and scripts before the interview. Otherwise, the participants will lose patience if you are taking the time to prep the equipment.