BEFORE TIMES
Pre-pandemic, I led design and strategy for the Loyalty product team. My sole focus was supporting and championing the Bonvoy Loyalty user experience across all digital platforms. In my short time in the role, I kicked off and led efforts for the massive rollout of the China Mobile Phone Authentication feature, and was actively working across the organization to tackle Global Mobile Phone Authentication. I pushed my team to think strategically about the new partnerships we were building— from Cobranded Credit Cards to Airline Programs to creating opportunities for our users to donate their hard-earned points to global charities. I also contributed my leadership to Loyalty efforts across the Native App redesign to increase engagement, drive enrollment and reduce friction for all of our Loyalty users.
SUMMER O’ PANDEMIC
After being furloughed in the Spring with the rest of our digital team, I was brought back early Summer as part of a digital skeleton crew to work on a variety of recovery efforts as we began to see the impact the pandemic was having on the travel industry. While we watched our Loyalty users significantly shift from business travelers to leisure travelers, I spent my summer prototyping and presenting strategies and ideas on how to best capture this new audience. From helping stand up a Luxury “Hub” for our active luxury users to designing and iterating on new leisure products geared towards this unknown audience, we were all focused on recovery and ensuring that our property owners and customers had confidence that we were taking every precaution to keep them safe and healthy.
LOOKING AHEAD
With a new reorg in effect (and a Loyalty program still in recovery efforts), I now lead design and strategy for our new Digital Merchandising Experience team. Merchandising includes anything that encourages a user to not just think of Marriott as a hotel company, but as a travel company, showcasing additional offerings like cobranded credit cards, promotions, homes & villas, vacation and escape products, etc. These initiatives add value to the guest experience and our goal is to reflect that value across digital platforms.
When a user begins to shift their perception of Marriott, we want them to see that we’ve made travel easy. That’s how we’ll measure success as we evolve our current products and build news ones in the coming years.
Client: Marriott, Role: Director of Experience Design for Loyalty, Director of Experience Design for Digital Merchandising