Go Mode & Flow Mode

With the Covid-19 driven drop in business travel Marriott needed to connect with leisure travelers in a way that would answer the prevailing question of existential importance: “How do I get the most out of what may be rare and limited opportunities to travel?” . We created a new approach that included an innovative activities oriented way to build a trip, and fresh navigation, components, and page flows that would entice leisure and luxury travelers. Despite their often opposing priorities, I was able to turn both the Marriott design system governance team and our key stakeholder into big fans of our solutions.

Challenge

Marriott.com shopping experience was disjointed, with multiple customer archetypes, expectations, and entry points
Make improvements site-wide from room rate and detail pages to alternative design schemes for luxury brands like Ritz-Carlton and Edition
Motivate customers frustrated by years of Covid-19 limitations on travel by inspiring and preparing for “revenge travel”
Needed a unifying framework to serve both ready-to-book travelers and inspiration-seeking travelers

Approach

Helped shape the strategic direction and storytelling arc for the pitch
Collaborated on logic, hypotheses, and persuasive arguments to win stakeholder buy-in
Designed high-fidelity wireframes for user testing to validate ideas and uncover insights
Supported the team in crystallizing a customer-centric path forward

Impact

I conceived our experience model approach of Go Mode → customers ready to purchase, seeking frictionless booking and Flow Mode → customers open to when/where and seeking travel inspiration
Positioned the brand to better connect with leisure travelers during a pivotal market shift
Delivered a compelling strategy that balanced conversion-focused booking flows with inspiration-driven exploration
Our efforts helped set the stage and provided a platform for revenue growth from $20.77 billion in 2022 to $25.1 billion in 2024

I

Client

Marriott International

Project

Home Page, Loyalty, Room Booking and more

Agency

Publicis Sapient

Timeline

2021-2022

Creative Team

Group Creative Direction / Mark Wagner
Creative Direction / Todd Zerger
Design / Nadia Shen + Kelly Xie
UX / Zoey Zou + Andy Kajmowicz

Creative Direction and Experience Design

The Journey Before the Journey

To tap into the excitement and full potential of travel and support consumers for whom the many options can quickly become overwhelming, we explored a "trip builder" that could follow along with each consumers interests as indicated by browsing behavior, to shape a trip that includes activities and incentives as well as the date and location information needed to generate rates.

Creative Direction and Experience Design

Process

Moving quickly during the pitch included team crazy 8 sketching exercises before jumping into Sketch. I'm a fan of collaborating out in the open so we used Mural to catalog existing features, prioritize them by archetype, and connect inputs (including client brief, strategic hypotheses, and available research and analytics) to the evolving wireframes to help our stakeholders appreciate the logic of progress.

Testable Wireframes

Further hypothesizing that customers seeking to book will have different expectations based on where their journey started (a luxury brand site like Ritz Carlton versus a location-based search on Google for instance) we built a mental model to help the organization consider the implications of disaggregating the booking criteria so they could be compiled in a sequence that best suited the travelers mode and entry point. In this way a traveler interested in a resort vacation but flexible in terms of location and time frame is not forced to start with city and dates as in the current paradigm. This helped me create high-fidelity wireframes that threw the needs of each archetype into sharp relief to make customer feedback more actionable.

Existing Design