In-Room Experience

Most in-room technology is designed for the hotel, not the guest. Ours became the primary touchpoint between a guest and everything the hotel had to offer — across five luxury properties.

Guest-Facing · Luxury Hospitality

The brief started with room controls. What the product actually needed to become was the quiet centre of a guest's entire stay — in-room dining, item requests, property content, and yes, the room controls too. One product, built for five luxury properties.

Mapping the territory - Research

Getting the experience right for a luxury context meant understanding what guests actually needed — and where existing in-room technology was quietly failing them.

We ran a workshop with the people who know guests best — Front Desk, Butler, and Housekeeping. Not the guests themselves, who often can't articulate friction until after they've checked out, but the operational teams absorbing it every day. What came out wasn't a wishlist. It was a prioritised, validated feature set: some from the business brief, others from a Butler noting, almost offhand, something guests always asked that the app could easily answer.

We followed the workshop with user testing to stress-test assumptions before committing to high-fidelity design.

From the design workflows into the system work

Working with the UX lead, I mapped the full user journey and built prototypes before committing to hi-fi. On the UI side, my focus was ensuring the interface elevated each property's brand — not a generic hotel-app aesthetic, but something that felt like it belonged in that specific room.

Feature enhancement was ongoing after launch; we kept listening. Home screen navigation rework, tray collection, room control improvements — each came from real feedback, and each went through the same loop: research, prototype, present, refine.

Scaling that across five properties meant rethinking the foundation. I led the move to a single unified design system — colour tokens and typography tokens mapped to each property's brand. A new launch no longer needs a redesign budget; a new colour theme is enough for the entire product to adapt. That required close collaboration with development to make the token layer a shared language between design and engineering, not just a designer's preference.

Holding it together - Collaboration

A product this complex doesn't get built in a design tool. Most of the real work happened in conversations — with product managers, BAs, POs, and property business units, each with their own requirements and priorities.