Hilton Communal Workspace

While researching Hilton Meetings & Events spaces, we discovered an unmet need for business travelers staying and working at hotels. According to our survey, over 60% of guests don't want to work in their rooms. Instead, they're looking for an energizing space, near other people where they feel empowered and more productive. When we uncovered this insight, I advocated for the product team to pivot and turn this new discovery into a project. With buy-in from leadership, I led a product team through research, ideation, lo-fi prototype testing and a full-scale test using a staged space at a property in London. Ultimately, we learned a ton and were able to show through a proof-of-concept that guests and non-guests would be willing to pay for an energizing, productive work environment at a hotel -- an entirely new idea for the industry.

My role in this project was leading the strategy for a cross-functional product team, communicating with senior leadership, leading the research, facilitating the ideation workshops, creating the prototypes for testing, facilitating the live testing and interviewing, and helping to oversee the concept build out.

Research & Ideation

Quantitative & Qualitative

Coming into this project, we had already done a bit of research on the question of "how people work in a hotel." But we needed to dig deeper and validate our key insight to see if we were on the right track. I led qualitative research doing one-on-one phone and in-person interviews with 20 Hilton guests (10 business travelers and 10 social travelers) and 10 Hilton operational staff. We then identified the key goals, needs and desired outcomes for these two sets of guests and integrated them into a quantitative survey sent to 1,000 respondents. This quant survey would also help inform how we might prioritize needs.

Once we synthsized our findings, I brought the team together for a full-day workshop to collectively identify the key problem we needed to solve and begin coming up with creative solutions. We honed in on our problem statement:

How might we create an energizing place to work where guests feel productive?

Prototyping & Testing

Our lo-fi prototypes became brochures for our "Hilton Spaces" concept -- a communal workspace designed to energize workers. We created both a digital pdf format and a printed three-fold paper version. We then placed ads and organic posts on LinkedIn and other social platforms to recruit qualified respondents, and met our respondents at coffee shops to share our prototypes. Our goal was to understand how the space made the users feel, and gauge likelihood to pay for the space or amenities.

Takeaway

We were on the right track. Respondents' came alive and their immediate reaction was "I'd like to go there now... where can I find this?" Certain features stongly resonated with test participants, while others were clearly uninteresting. We took these directional findings and incorporated them into our final staging plans.

Staging & Testing

After reflecting on our learnings from the lo-fi prototypes, we needed more tangible proof that our communal workspace concept could be successful. The next step? Fake a real-life communal workspace. To bring it to life, we partnered with a hotel in Kensington, London to create our space. We designed the space, ordered the furniture and I put a test plan together with the help of our research team.

We invited 6 guests and 6 non-guests to use the space to work for an hour before interviewing them. We wanted to better understand their reactions, their likes, dislikes, challenges, whether the space made them feel energized or productive. We also wanted to evaluate how likely our respondents were to pay to use this space.

Takeaways

What did we learn? Lots. Guests were gravitating to this space. They really wanted to be here, sit here, open up their laptops, read a book or have a conversation. It definitely was energizing. Things to improve on? Sure, there were plenty. For example, the lack of privacy, (both audio and visual privacy) bothered those who came to get quiet work done or talk on the phone. Ultimately, we were able to learn enough to validate our proof of concept and make improvements that would lead to an exceptional experience -- one that guests and non-guests would pay for.