HILTON HOTELS -
'JOURNEY ROOMS'
Hilton Hotels is working to serve a unique experience that can be mass produced for a wide range of customers. Having a long history with its older travelers, Hilton wants to keep its customer base while attracting new ones.
Responding to the brand’s position, I designed a Pittsburgh-based pop-up highlighting Hilton's identity as a highly personalized travel experience for younger future travelers.
'Journey Rooms' invites visitors to describe their travel fantasies in a space that evolves with them, then creating trip recommendations that match their vision.
HILTON BRAND
RESEARCH
Brand research focused on Hilton's place in the hospitality industry, its target/potential audiences, and the character of the company.
Hilton has created a brand centered on the individual, focused on providing
'one-of-one' travel experiences at a worldwide scale. Hilton does this through innovative personalization for its customers and media campaigns sharing traveler stories from its many iconic locations.
Hilton is a brand that works closely with its guests to give them unique, transformative travel experiences that feel tailor-made for them.
SPACE/FORM DESIGN
Designing the 'Journey Room' form began with simple physical prototypes and quick sketches. Early shapes and features explored here led to many of the design choices
I made when iterating through different 3D models.
Once a final shape was reached, many of the detail decisions such as material choice and the interior layout were made by referencing Hilton bedrooms, lobbies, and exteriors from both local and global flagship properties.
This was done with quick iterations on a base model to see how smaller features and material options worked with the overall form and branding.
VISITOR JOURNEY
The visitor journey is divided into Excitement building before the experience, Entry into the space, visitor Engagement with the pop-up, Exit from the space, and Extension of the experience for visitors after they leave.
01 - EXT. ATTRACTION
03 - EXT. ENTRY
02 - EXT. LINE WAIT
'JOURNEY' SCENARIO 01
'JOURNEY' SCENARIO 02
Visitor Journey Process
The storyboard went through a few iterations as a I figured out how to increase excitement outside of the space, keep waiting times low and develop the back-and-forth interaction visitors have within a Hilton Journey Room.
EXTENSION EXPERIENCE
Hilton Recommendations
After exiting, visitors are sent specific Hilton properties which match aspects of their room, accessed through the Hilton Honors App.
This underscores Hilton's focus on personalization and extends the experience past the elevator doors by giving visitors an individualized piece of their own fantasy to bring with them after they've left.
‘Journey Rooms’ aims to keep the intimacy of a hotel room while transporting visitors across custom worlds with distinct sensory changes, all through a simple and clear interaction.
Since 'Journey Rooms' is personalized, there is a large range of potential destinations that visitors could create. Ideally, from a user perspective it appears unlimited making their fantasy completely unique.
'JOURNEY ROOM' INTERACTION DESIGN
From Hilton's perspective, however, for the pop-up to be feasible there needs to be a consistent, set 'decision map' that shows how each Question/Answer pair affects the room's changes.
'JOURNEY' SCENARIO 01
'JOURNEY' SCENARIO 02
Journey Room 'Scenarios' + Changes
Below examples of decision and space change maps for two specific scenarios - showing how the questions, answers, and changes build on each other to from specific visitor decisions.
Q/A Table Design
A complex system, with unique inputs and variable outputs that affect an entire space, needed a simple and clear interaction.
The Question-Answer table consists of easy-to read text that gives both the question and possible answers in one piece of text, delineated by light/opacity.
Visitors select answers with a hotel bell-like sliding mechanism, which becomes looser as questions become more open-ended.
