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A Case Study in Human-Centric UX

The Mission

A major hospitality brand wanted to reimagine their new employee onboarding to empower new employees and establish strong cultural foundations to the brand. Their current approach—a generic PowerPoint—lacked emotional connection and failed to reflect the warmth and humanity of their brand identity. New employees lacked confidence and hotel culture was eroding, with both factors contributing to high turnover rates.

My client’s current approach to digital onboarding—PowerPoints and virtual slideware—looked like this:

I was brought in as the Creative Director based on a successful history collaborating with this client on previous learning campaigns.

Finding Our North Star

The hotel brand emphasized values like family, togetherness, and the feeling of home—but their onboarding experience (digital documents and passive slideware) didn’t reflect that at all. Online training was the standard for new employees, which left a major gap in understanding how brand and culture came to life on the job.

How do we create effective hotel brand immersion for new employees without stepping foot into a hotel?

Charting a Course

In collaboration with an instructional designer, we identified SMEs (stakeholders, V-suite brand executives, and hotel general managers) and held a series of interviews to dive deep into the brand. Some (non-exhaustive) questions we asked were:

Brand Identity

Content Design

UX Exploration

  • What does “feeling at home” mean across cultures and roles? How does this appear in current brand collateral?

  • How flexible is the visual identity of the brand?

  • Which elements of the brand guidelines resonate most strongly with employees, and why?

  • Why did you recently refresh the brand? What makes this brand distinct from other brands?

  • What does “warmth” sound like?

  • What emotions does the brand evoke? How do these emotions manifest in the day-to-day actions of an employee?

  • What are the key learning takeaways?

  • What do employees feel right now? How should they feel when the experience is over?

  • What training do new employees take prior to this one? After this one?

  • What is current training doing well, and where does it need to be improved?

  • What are the modality, technology, and timeline considerations?

  • How open are you to new ideas?

Building the Rocket Ship

The wealth of information we gained from our deep dive clarified one key message, which gave clarity to our content and creative approach.

We can’t bring the user to the hotel, so we must bring the hotel to the user.

That’s right: the digital onboarding had to feel as human as possible, lively and multifaceted like the real hotel where new employees would work. In short: immersive storytelling.

Content
(Scriptwriting)

My collaborator and I scripted three fictional character personas based on authentic circumstances and personalities. In order to make the messaging sound human, brand and marketing copy were rewritten from a character perspective to emulate real conversations and concerns. (Toolset: Miro, Figma, MS Word)

Many of our guests are displaced from their homes due to extraneous circumstances, and stay with us for weeks or even months. We can make them feel at home by remembering little details about their habits, likes and dislikes.
Andres: "I don't even need to ask for a drink when I sit down for breakfast--Saniah brings me a Spanish coffee every day!"

Passive 3rd-person brand messaging became 2nd-person active voice, with dialogue and narrative focusing on everyday occurrences that would realistically take place within the hotel.

Visual Design

Because it sounded like we were in a hotel, the UX needed to look like we were in a hotel. I led the visual design of the solution, working with stakeholders to map a real hotel using photography and understand why each space was important to the brand. Then, working with my art director and illustrator, we recreated external and internal spaces required to match the new content. (Toolset: Adobe Illustrator, Figma)

The hotel exterior was just as important as the interior—even new employees walk in the front door!

Interaction Design

Traditional elearning authoring tools (Rise, Adapt) offer traditional knowledge checks, but we needed ours to feel more organic to the environment. Inspired by the early childhood of my own niece and the pre-K curriculum, I designed interactions that required looking and listening to the characters depending on their location in the hotel.
(Toolset: Miro, Figma)

After meeting two characters at breakfast, the learner would be asked what they were drinking. This reinforced observational learning while retaining narrative immersion.

Our immersive Webflow onboarding featured a guided “day-in-the-life” journey that moved the learner through a digital hotel recreation filled with diverse employees, guests, and narratives. How did we apply our human-centric concept? By positioning the learner as the focus of our fictional journey and emulating the human experience through the combination of immersive visuals and content from the moment they walked in the door:

Destination Reached

A note on accessibility:

But what about the learning objectives? How could we be sure that new employees would leave the experience feeling confident about the most important messages? Well, we distilled these takeaways into a form that we knew they would understand: social media.

While WCAG 2.0 compliance was a standard for all hospitality client work, this particular group of stakeholders prioritized use of the Webflow authoring tool over accessibility. To ensure accessibility requirements were met, our team also designed a “descriptive PDF”: an alternate version of the course that met requirements for alt-text, UI, screen readers, and colour contrast. A fully-accessible landing page was developed to access to both solutions.

A New Star is Born

Our onboarding experience became a benchmark for brand-aligned learning across the client’s global enterprise. Anecdotal responses from internal stakeholders and new hires highlighted a significant emotional shift:

“It made me feel like
I was joining something
meaningful—not just
starting a job.”

The project deepened our partnership with the client and helped pave the way for additional brand-forward learning projects. In addition, the learning solution became a baseline for selling Webflow and immersive narrative to new and existing clients.

What made this project so successful?

  • Human-centered storytelling acted as the “North Star” of the UX.

  • Writing captured authentic human experiences to drive the relatability of the brand voice.

  • Visuals and interactions replicated the time, space, and liveliness of a real hotel, only digital.

What were my takeaways?

  • The marriage of storytelling + design can foster powerful and relatable human connection when told from a place of authenticity whilst being developed collaboratively.

  • Immersion, when used to replicate human experiences, remains memorable outside of the solution.

  • Spending more time in pre-production earns greater overall production confidence and efficiency.