UX STRAT USA, Shiloh Barnat, "Scaling UX Strategy for Digital Interactions with Physical Spaces"
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Shiloh Barnat's presentation at UX STRAT USA 2015
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UX STRAT USA, Shiloh Barnat, "Scaling UX Strategy for Digital Interactions with Physical Spaces"
- 3. Business Context | Methods | Strategy | Results
- 4. Business Context • Evolving customer expectations • Industry disruption • Executive mandate
- 6. “The industry is moving fast and we’re trying to move fast with it…. We believe our guests want that sort of choice and control.” ~ Joshua Sloser, VP of Digital Product and Innovation
- 7. “Everyone will be forced to play this way eventually…. It is just a question of how quickly you get there.” ~ Jim Holthouser, Executive VP of Global Brands
- 8. Methods • Value proposition / ROI • Future vision goals • 3rd-party research
- 13. “… the hospitality industry has a history of being hyper –focused on the booking portion of the customer journey..” ~ Joshua Sloser, VP of Digital Product and Innovation
- 15. Strategy • Business process mapping • Custom workflow • Production process • Mapping engine • Automation scripting • Data specifications
- 27. Results • Mission accomplished • World mapped • Central repository • Change management • Future flexibility
- 30. 183% conversion lift 41 million+ users 91% satisfaction
- 31. Key TakeAways • It’s all about the people • Vision matters • Automation helps • Plan for curved walls
Editor's Notes
- Hello Everybody!... So, this is my third UX Strat conference and I’m SO honored to be up here on the stage side of it this year. I am Shiloh Barnat, VP of UX Strategy at Lokion– a spunky medium sized interactive agency based in Memphis, TN. I manage the team that includes our BA’s, IA’s, iXd’s, creative designers, graphic production folks and QA coordinators / testers. I’ve been drawn to this UX Strategy tribe because, as a UX Unicorn orbiting the corporate hairball for some 20 years or so who has worn most of the hats – Webmistress, Sys Admin, IT consultant, web designer, UI dev, IA, BA, PM, Scrum Master – it’s become abundantly clear that success mostly emerges from hybrid approaches smartly balancing user priorities with business priorities with technology possibilities.
- In the time between the first UX Strat and this one, my team back home at Lokion has been going through a shift, getting in shape if you will. It’s a shift that I suspect a lot of us are going through. Our work has been getting more physical…. Lately, we’ve found ourselves focusing less on planning user interfaces for on-screen experiences (though we still do plenty of that) and more on inventing new digital interactions with “the real world.” We’ve been diving into the “Internet of Things” in some of our work, better understanding what it takes to design things like fans and lights that activate when you walk in the room with your phone in your pocket. We’ve been learning about experiences that can be enabled by various sensors and beacons. And we’ve been thinking a lot lately about geographic information or geospatial data and how it gets generated and stored and mapped and used to facilitate human interactions. Suddenly our UX strategies are filled with stories of humans moving through physical spaces like buildings, hallways, landscapes and interacting with stuff in those spaces through the things we create…. Raise your hand if you too are at least a little bit designing strategies grounded in physical interactions like these?
- As an example of this shift we’ve been going through, I’m going to share some details about the work we’ve been doing with Hilton Hotels. At the end of 2014, Hilton became the first in the hospitality industry to offer visual maps for selecting your hotel room, which is just one out of a TON of exciting new interactions that could be made possible by mapping spatial data. I’m going to share with you the context of this work, the methods and strategies we used, some of the challenges we faced along the way and the shift in perspective it’s brought to our design thinking and UX Strategy work.
- For Hilton’s “Getting Physical” strategy, it’s important to understand the business situation Hilton was facing when we got started. Their challenges probably sound pretty familiar to a lot of you as they translate to lots of other industries and contexts. Raise your hands if this sounds familiar: Customers want more direct and visual control over their choices. Inventive competitors pop up to fill experience gaps. And suddenly executive management is paying attention and insisting it’s time to get with the times and do something new. Anyone? At least a bit familiar?
- One of the main backdrops to our work in the digital mapping space is that we’ve all come to expect to be able to do things visually… to select our airplane and concert seats from interactive spatial maps that show us where that decision point lives in relation to other decision factors – windows, aisles, bathrooms, friends. We’ve been picking airplane seats this way for a decade now. So, why not also our hotel rooms?
- When we started this digital mapping project with Hilton, they well knew that they had some catching up to do to meet customer expectations. For example, one survey Hilton conducted with Edelman last year found that an overwhelming 84% of business travelers want the ability to select their own room visually like they do their airline seat or rental car.
- Another interesting backdrop to our spatial mapping work with Hilton was the pressure coming at them from industry disruptors. While this project was kicking off, Google and Bing launched their interior or venue maps beginning to grow the ability for users to navigate through certain indoor spaces, like malls and airports… at least the ones who could provide the spatial data to integrate with their systems. And, as if that weren’t interesting and similar enough to what we were doing, then the Room77 startup came along aimed specifically at using spatial data for the hospitality industry. Their site gave customers rough property and building maps for context with “virtual reality style” satellite views from hotel room windows hoping to revolutionize the way people pick hotel bookings. (BTW: Google quickly acquired Room77 that same year.) These external influences really lit a fire under the hospitality industry and set the speed to market urgency clock ticking. Thus was born our mission… MAP THE WORLD – or at least all of the Hilton hotels in the world... in a little over a year…. NO PROBLEM!, right?
- So, let me start by leveling up about our methods for gathering and analyzing data to inform the strategy. Obviously, in an ideal world our methods would have worked from a much more direct user-centric foundation. We would have done contextual inquiry hotel visits to find out: how customers might use visual spatial information on their various devices before, during and after a stay how hotel staff interact with customers around room selection, upgrades, wayfinding, etc. and how property information gets managed as it changes over time We would have facilitated ThinkFactory workshops with teams across the enterprise where we: tried on personas to imagine scenarios for human spatial interactions for different kinds of users -- business travelers vs. vacationing families vs. event planners sketched visionary storyboards compiled into a holistic customer journey map covering all of the stages of their journey before, during and after a hotel stay mapped possibilities to their evolving business and product service strategy created POC prototypes to test potential future use cases of spatial data with real users We knew that would be the ideal path to a really strategic UX strategy. And we pitched it. But did I mention the timeline?... Map every single Hilton hotel… all over the world… in great detail… ready for use by millions of users… in a little over a year. SO… instead, since all of that just wasn’t in our scope of work, we dove straight into tactical work. We: catalogued business and IT goals and plans absorbed third-party hospitality industry market research mapped business process workflows, requirements and data structures scoped production labor based on projections of how many buildings and floors and rooms and interaction points we’d be mapping and the varying levels of complexity involved, etc. Sometimes, as UX Strategists, we find ourselves in the role of being keepers of the vision having to think ahead from multiple perspectives even when that’s not the gig (especially in the agency world). But that compelling vision and empathetic perspective guides the story nonetheless even when we don’t get to do all of the steps we know would be smart to do.
- Luckily, we did have a decent starting place with a fair concept of the work ahead because we had already created several hundred carefully designed flat graphical floor plans for the Homewood Suites and Home2 Suites web sites over the years leading up to this initiative. We already had a pretty good handle on the landscape of varied source formats that we would be working from, how to communicate with busy hotel staff, the likely coordination needed with other partners such as architects and print signage vendors, etc….
- And the immediate vision was pretty clear. People want to make choices visually. So, the immediate mandate, the mission if you will, was to produce these hotel maps and floor plans for bookings so you can select your room, check-in before arrival and upgrade your room while in transit…. That’s where the budget for this initiative would be justified because that’s the focal transaction point for hotels, right? The conversion. The return on investment. Everything is measured in terms of increased bookings, “heads in beds.”
- With that as our stated business goal, we began figuring out exactly what needed to be mapped. We envisioned users might want to see and interact with to make their decisions about what room to select and modeled various ways that users might navigate between buildings and floors.
- And… we thought through those levels knowing full well that the external research clearly indicates that customers envision all sorts of future hotel interaction possibilities way beyond just booking rooms.
- We all knew that visual room selection for booking wouldn’t be the end of the story…. So, we looked ahead and began to envision what it might look like for these maps to be smart enough to understand WHO and WHEN and WHERE you are on the map. What happens when these maps get hooked up with interior positioning and personalization and social networks and…? Oh, boy... THAT’s when this stuff gets really fun!!! What if you could navigate through buildings and floors in 3D? And what if, knowing the time of day and your position on the property, these maps could make it easy to see what’s open around you and get turn-by-turn directions from your room to the meeting space where you’ll be presenting soon? What about integrating with external map services to get the larger context of what’s around you?... The possibilities beyond the basics are really fun to think about… but less simple to design around.
- So, we worked together and let our imaginations wander a bit to envision the spatial interaction stories that might one day be supported by the maps we were creating. Here are a couple of my favorites. Imagine if: You’ve just landed in an unfamiliar city. You haven’t sorted out how you’re going to get to your hotel yet. But no worries ‘cause your hotel reservation knows it’s the day of your arrival and detects that you’re at the airport, so a notification pops up with recommended options for ground transportation that get you there in the shortest time with the least hassle. Of course it’s super late and you’re tired, so as you’re checking in on your phone in the entryway you zoom in to see that the hotel map knows you’re on the property and therefore clearly highlights what’s open… the bar is pretty much your only option this late which is just fine with you! The next day, your hotel app knows there’s a gap in the action of your conference schedule and matches that to some open slots in the property amenities that you might not have even known were there and prompts you with options. So, you take advantage of the downtime to reserve a quick manicure and have lunch delivered poolside and charged to your room. And then the conference is over but your flight doesn’t leave for several hours. So, you pull up the hotel map quickly on your watch to discover there’s a spa quite close which you book with a tap. So many more stories and I can hardly wait for some of them to come true....
- Driven by a broad future-focused vision of the business context and user experience possibilities, the mission began to come together into a cohesive strategy to smartly combine human effort, automation scripting and creative management into a well-oiled machine to turn flat visuals into fully validated well-structured geospatial data ready for the long-haul. Along the way, we worked through some interesting challenges and learned a TON about what it takes to design strategically for huge scale spatial interactions.
- Of course, it would have been awesome if we actually got to go visit all of the spaces being mapped. I, for one, really really really want to go stay underwater in the Hilton Maldives. But we knew for darned sure there was no way THAT was gonna be in the budget and the timeline. So, we knew we were going to have to get our starting information about each place some other way.
- One of our first tasks in this work with Hilton was all about the humans involved in gathering information about each property and keeping communication flowing along the way. We worked with stakeholders to understand the roles and personalities and motivations and communication habits in the mix. And we mapped out an efficient system of information gathering input points, file exchanges, motivational nudges and nags and escalation cycles, smart yet flexible automated status updates and customized role-based reporting that would orchestrate activities necessary to get all of the pieces gathered up that would be needed to even get started. This need to manage human participation in spatial mapping likely translates to just about any situation or industry where we might be creating digital interactions with physical spaces on a large scale. No matter how much technology and automation your throw at it, you just can’t remove PEOPLE from the process. There are companies out there experimenting with non-human spatial mapping using little Rumba-like robots and lasers and things, which sounds really interesting but that just isn’t practical for us quite yet.
- We needed a way to keep the daily communication between literally thousands of humans all over the world organized -- a sort of Basecamp for collecting details about hotels. And not finding a perfect match for that need, we customized our own proprietary workflow management application to fit the way they worked.
- Since these maps needed to support not just the immediate business goal but also all sorts of potential future human-spatial interactions, the output needed to be very structured yet fluid data that can adapt to lots of disparate systems and device contexts and usage scenarios over time. So, getting further into the details, we needed to figure out exactly what data and interaction points to include in the maps and how to validate all sorts of file types gathered as source materials, exchanged while track down missing information, used as reference during production and output for review and approval processes and ultimately for absorption into their various usage contexts. And then we needed to build a mapping engine that would efficiently churn through all these of moving parts enabling the human effort while automating as much as possible.
- But let’s pause here for a second because this really is one of the greatest challenges in spatial mapping -- reaching agreement on WHAT to map. How much detail needs to be present to support immediate plans AND future visions? For any industry – hotels, malls, airports, hospitals, campuses -- the list of WHAT to map could be quite different. But, this critical step of understanding what details users might want to know about and interact with on the property NEEDS to inform the spatial data specification no matter what kind of space is being mapped. In the case of hotels, some elements are obvious. We clearly needed to map buildings and floors and rooms plus details like lobbies, elevators and stairways, and maybe niceties like restaurants and bars and swimming pools, etc…. But what about less common features like golf courses, fire pits and water slides… or, my personal favorite, the giant lawn chess board at the Waldorf Arizona Biltmore?... We carefully mapped the structural specifications for a very specific list of standard elements, features and amenities that guests might want to interact -- plus an agreeable quantity of interesting oddities like lawn chess – resulting in an architectural plan to organize what turned into LOTS AND LOTS OF PHYSICAL SPACE INTERACTION POINTS.
- We also learned VERY quickly that… not all maps are created equally… some spaces are just more… “interesting” than others…. Mapping a nice square bed-in-a-box single building hotel that has sensible right-angle walls and not much variance beyond the lobby space on the first floor is a COMPLETELY different task than mapping a big fancy resort with interesting curvy walls, cabanas everywhere and delightful water features. So, in order to scale our mapping engine, our automation scripting, our staffing and schedule we needed to categorize and quantify the complexity and curveballs (or curved walls) that translate into level of effort for every single property.
- For example… The Hilton Squaw Peaks Resort was our pilot test model. So, we got quite familiar with its winding 4-acre Hole-in-the-Wall River Ranch water park surrounded by split-level Casitas. Imagine deciding WHAT TO MAP in THAT landscape!
- The Makkah Hilton Towers in front of the King Fahd entrance to the world's largest mosque in Mecca was extra fun to map with it’s 35 elevators and 71 stair wells spread across it’s four guest towers with varied split level floors and separate stairs leading to many of it’s 798 rooms.
- Honestly, at some points, it felt like there were more exceptions than rules. And mapping some of those spaces felt a bit like being lost in MC Escher’s world.
- But ultimately, at its core our mapping engine (both systematic and human) has to efficiently transform - regardless of complexity - flat pixel-based visual references conceptually representing physical spaces into the much more fluid structural essence of data reflecting the projected reality of what’s important for people to be able to move through and DO in those spaces… at different moments in time… through spatial interactions not yet invented…. IT GETS COMPLICATED, BUT IT’S KIND OF FUN!... This thing bottom-left is a little snippit of code that comes out of this process ready to be absorbed and rendered in a multitude of human-spatial interaction contexts. And this thing bottom-right is a snapshot of the layers of structured interaction points added to the spatial data which stack up to crack open a all sorts of possibilities for new ways for humans to interact with the space around them – all of this adding up to the technical underpinnings of exciting new physical experience stories we can now design our strategy around.
- Oh yeah, did I mention the timeline? Just a little over a year… which flies by mighty fast. So, we had to get quite creative along the way to infuse our mapping engine, human production processes and workflow management system with as much automation as possible to pull all these pieces together in the expected timeframe. To reach economies of scale and meet this challenging deadline: We baked in scripted replication and sequential labeling of every consistent element possible. We rolled in machine learning quality assurance checkpoints that audited output for consistent structural logic that adapted over time as the specification shifted to accommodate each new curveball. And we encouraged all of our production folks to share every little trick they could find for speeding up map creation tasks.
- And it worked!... Our strategy to map the world by the deadline to get them first to market succeeded. And we learned SO MUCH!
- By the finish line, our team digitally mapped over 1.5 MILLION spatial interaction points including 707,040 Hilton hotel rooms to be visually booked in 4,292+ hotels across 11 brands in 93 countries…. And we’re still busily mapping new hotels being built since then, so these numbers shift all the time.
- And believe you me, this was NOT just a technology challenge. It was most definitely a strategic business strategy with a whole lot of human challenges. The constant flow of communication necessary to gather up various bits of information about these hotels included more than 17k phone calls with folks on the ground at these hotels… often late at night because of time zones and/or including multiple languages not to mention more than 80k emails and over 28k reference files exchanged to get the information needed to do digital map data production.
- But most importantly… Our team delivered on time so that not just visual but SMART maps and floor plans could be rendered within the HiltonHonors web experience and mobile app breaking new ground with the hospitality industry’s first visual room selection feature. And that new experience strategy has proven to be very successful. Within four months of launching this feature, one million Honors members had used the mapping features for room selection capabilities. The HiltonHonors mobile app with visual room selection is now used by 41 million+ HiltonHonors members. And perhaps even more importantly, we created a centralized property data repository with an efficient change management engine and ongoing expansion of data elements and interaction points ready to serve all those other impending use cases and future yet to be dreamed of ways for people to interact with physical hotel spaces.
- So… we’re plowing forward with this digital mapping for human-spatial interactions and busily applying what we learned in the Hilton project. It’s all about the people – not just users, but information gatekeepers and business decision-makers and teams and partners who pull it all together. Efficient workflow organizing all those humans is essential to this kind of work. It’s only by planning for the future that we even begin to see clearly what needs to be on the map. The secret sauce to scaling this kind of mapping has at least a little bit to do with systematizing as much of the work and the validation as possible so the humans can stay focused on the bits that just can’t be automated. Physical space just isn’t consistent. Variances from the anticipated structures are likely the norm rather than the exception. Plan for it.
- And we as a team have seriously shifted our perspective. We are not just applying design thinking to architect software and create elegant on-screen interactions, though we still do quite a bit of that. We have morphed into strategic experience designers and product development pioneers experimenting all the time with proof of concept extensions that apply to lots of other industries and open up all sorts of cool new spatial interaction possibilities - things like interior wayfinding across buildings and floors, satellite views out any window, geospatial data mashups and “zero screen” interactions based on knowledge of who and where and when you are in relation to what’s around you. It’s more fun than ever to get up and go to work these days! We’ve entered the exciting territory of “WHAT IF LAND.”... And I expect a lot of you are also seeing your UX Strategy work open up to these new dimensions of time and physical space and non-screen smart things in the interaction visions we champion. My current moto: We’re all in this soup together. This is only the beginning. And I’m just up here to be a part of the conversation. If you’d like to talk more about scaling ux strategy for interactions with physical space, I’d love to meet you at the 3:30 breakout session. AND… I’ve got a bonus prize for the first person at the breakout session who can tell me how many times Olivia Newton John appeared in this presentation. (12) Thanks for listening!