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A Case Study in Human-Centric Learning

THE CHALLENGE

A major hospitality brand wanted to reimagine their new employee onboarding to empower new employees and establish strong cultural foundations for one of their brands. Why? Because new employees lacked confidence, hotel metrics were on the decline, and the industry was experiencing high turnover rates.

The hotel brand emphasized values like family, togetherness, and the feeling of home—but their onboarding experience was severely dated. How could digital documents and slide presentations evoke the brand identity, let alone show new employees what the concept of “family” looks like within a hotel. The gap between knowledge of the brand values and the embodiment of those same values was the key focus.

Did I mention the training was digital? In an industry that prides itself on human connection, the digital nature of the onboarding meant new employees weren’t exactly starting with their best foot forward. Indeed, on-site training did not occur until weeks after the digital onboarding. By that time, new employees were expected to understand and embody the brand despite not having lived it for even a single day.

It was clear which question needed to be answered:

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

THE RESEARCH

Interviews were requested and facilitated with key SMEs: training directors, head of brand, and hotel general managers. These key leadership roles allowed us to dive deep into the brand values and how these concepts were brought to life by employees on a day-to-day basis. While traditional instructional designers would focus the conversation on mental-model shifts and expected behaviours of employees, instead we focused our questions on day-to-day actions, mundane details, and a focus on “family”:

  • What does “feeling at home” mean across cultures and roles?

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

  • What does “warmth” sound like in words? What does it look like in action?

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

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

  • What core emotion defines and drives the experience design?

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

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

  • What does empowerment look like for a new employee?

  • How might we relate the values to an employee’s own family and culture?

A note on accessibility:

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.

THE APPROACH

The insights from our research clarified two key details that became the foundation of the solution design:

  1. We can’t bring the learner to the hotel—so we must bring a lively hotel to the learner, down to the smallest detail.

  2. Our solution required complicated and nuanced people at its heart. Fictional, yet complex.

Our ideation was incredibly fruitful and energetic: rooms and common spaces. Moving about the hotel. Guests coming and going. Sights and sounds. Displaced persons. Families and individuals. Hotel staff have problems, too. Exploration and discovery. Tactical pacing. Modern messaging. Socialization.

We were scoped for a web-based solution in Webflow, which meant we had options to create custom interactions outside traditional L&D authoring tools like Rise and Storyline.

The solution was a “day in the life”: a human-centric, immersive, digital web experience.

THE CONTENT

Three fictional character personas were written based on authentic circumstances and personalities, and all of whom captured the long-term displaced guests who made up the majority of hotel customers: a young girl moving across the country for a new job with her pet, a family who lost their house in a fire, an caregiver helping his parent transition to an elderly care facility.

Then, we created hotel staff with their own set of problems: a room attendant struggling with her child’s school, a manager who wants to show appreciation to a hard-working employee.

All of them became “onions”: layered and complex people with motivations, needs, and wants. And all of whom we would encounter during our “day-in-the-life” design.

Copy became the key to delivery. Because the existing training was written in third-person brand voice, we pitched a style shift to second-person active voice because:

  • “You” places the audience, rather than the organization, at the center of the narrative

  • “You” fosters ownership and autonomy

  • “You” increases opportunities for the audience to see themselves as an individual within content designed for a large audience (known as “everyman” in the storytelling world)

  • Characters speaking with “I” emulate a real conversation

The client’s existing brand content:

[Narrator] “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.”

Was rewritten to be conversational:

[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!"

THE VISUALS

If the words sounded like we were walking through a hotel, the visuals needed to match. I collaborated with brand stakeholders to map a real hotel using photography with an understanding of why each space was important to the brand. These spaces then became the locations for character encounters, starting with the exterior—because stepping through the doors of the hotel was a direct visual mirror for an employee beginning their day at work.

Photography wouldn’t be the visual style for the backgrounds, however. While it was important to have that sense of place reflect reality, the place couldn’t visually upstage the characters. As a result, I extrapolated the silhouette patterns within the existing brand identity as an illustration style that was modern and fresh, yet visually related.

We chose photography for the characters to emphasize that they reflected real people, despite the fictional scenario. The intentional contrast between the illustrated backgrounds behind character photographs meant created a strong visual contrast that allowed the people to stay front and center while the space reinforced the visual warmth of the hotel brand.

INTERACTION DESIGN

Traditional “knowledge checks” in the EdTech industry are most often defined by interaction libraries contained within the standard authoring tools (Rise, Storyline). You’ve probably seen them hundreds of times when you take any form of digital training: multiple choice questions with extremely obvious answers, text forms, true/false questions. They continue to be used because they are, from a scoping point-of-view, cheap to produce. In reality, they are rarely effective because they are overused and impersonal; our attention span wanders away from the content we’re supposed to be learning which turns these interactions into functional check-boxes to ensure a learner has made it through the required learning.

Checkbox design is bad design.

With Webflow as our development tool, our interactions would be coded from scratch. That meant we could recreate the standard ones, but why would we? Not only are they ineffective, but a true/false scenario isn’t the way you would work through the complex problems found in our fictional hotel.

Instead, I designed interactions based on behaviours: looking and listening. Paying attention to the people around you. Being present and mindful. One of my favourites involves the first interaction in our final solution, where learners must have observed each character’s drink during breakfast. It’s a multiple choice, yes, but with a few key differences:

  • the choices are visual, which is more intuitive to interpret (and globally understandable)

  • the interaction mirrors the exact behaviour (observational skills and relationships) that the learner should mimic when working at the real hotel

  • the setup and question are written in the same tone and style to maintain learner immersion

Even you, dear reader, can answer the question above!

MAKING IT STICKY

“Resonance” is a word I use every day, both in work and in life, because I am driven by opportunities to connect people. Without resonance—a shared emotional connection or experience—the vast majority of our daily interactions would be forgettable. And when you’re telling a story (or asking someone to listen to one), resonance is required. Only good stories are sticky.

For as much as we had a great story, modern visuals, and unique interactions, the immersive digital hotel wouldn’t be sticky if we didn’t have a way to make it relatable after the experience ends. In storytelling, the best way to do this is to replicate the actions of your audience. Show them that you understand them—unequivocally.

We chose a simple and elegant way to do this throughout our hotel experience: social media.

Our characters may be fictional, but the actions taken by the learner make a difference to them. And when this happens, we see the fictional characters showcasing these moments of impact on their (still fictional) social media accounts. Now, we have created an elegant experiential loop for the learner:

  • encounter characters as complex as people you meet in real life

  • do something small to help them through a moment in their day

  • see the impact of your action through their social media accounts

Sound familiar? The fictional characters are mimicking what you and I might do in the same circumstances. The fictional characters emulate real people. They are just like you. And you are just like them. The learning becomes more than learning, crossing into reality that matches the actions and behaviours of the learner in their everyday lives. It’s human-centric.

And that is resonance.

THE SOLUTION

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, narratives, and interactions. It was human-centric at its core, emulating decision-making and action in a fictional setting, but with outcomes that reflect reality to create a lasting impact long after the experience was over.

LASTING IMPACT

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, paving 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.

My key takeaway?

  • Immersion, when used to replicate authentic human experiences, remains highly resonant long after the experience ends.