Reimagining the cruise experience
What happens when every guest on a cruise has a wearable and ships are outfitted with enhanced infrastructure? Guests get a highly personalized and innovative travel experience. Crew members are given the tools and real-time information to do their jobs better. Administrators have unprecedented visibility into operations across their entire fleet. And in the event of safety incidents, more lives can be saved.
As Director of UX at Level 11, a Seattle-based software consultancy, I lead a multidisciplinary team of 24 UX designers and 3D/Motion designers as part of a 3-year initiative to reimagine, prototype, and deploy a new cruise experience for Carnival Corporations. In what can be described as a masterclass in Service Design, the team had to consider a complex mix of scenarios ranging from delighting guests to providing tactical information for the crew. Requests had to consider guest IDs and location and be routed across a large assortment of new and legacy systems.
Level 11 was one of several companies brought together for this $1 billion project. Carnival was asked in 2017 to deliver the Keynote at the 50th anniversary of the Consumer Electronics Show, a first in the hospitality industry.
The experience is centered on the Medallion, a blue-tooth wearable that identifies and locates each guest. That allowed Carnival to create personalized experiences for each guest with the brand goal of reviving the historically romantic notions of cruising.
Guest experiences
At the start, Level 11 was primarily responsible for the technical aspects of location services. But through carefully crafted design proposals and relationship building, we landed a few critical experiences. In each of these, I drove the high-level design and coordinated with partner design teams to create cohesive experiences.
Crew experiences
Level 11 owned the design and implementation of a few key crew experiences. I jumped in as an individual contributor for OCEAN Sense, an initiative to better understand guest sentiment. I architected the real-time collection of user and guest feedback based on a variety of signals (e.g. returned food orders, complaints, etc.) to facilitate immediate resolution. Previously, guest feedback was collected through laborious forms sent after the cruise when it was too late to resolve.
It started with observing cruisers and creating a journey map to identify new opportunities and enhance existing ones. We developed a number of innovative solutions including:
A custom photo app that creates a more social photo sharing experience.
A new apex experience for digitally browsing photos which replaced the print-based gallery.
Selfie stations and building a Raspberry Pi device to augment crew cameras.
A “Memories” feature embedded in the main user navigation.
An Apple TV app that automatically creates an interactive scrapbook incorporating user photos and relevant content provided by the cruise.
Photography journey map
Level 11 re-imagined the entire photography experience where the industry standard included crew members taking posed guest photos, printing them out, displaying them in a large gallery space, and then throwing away unclaimed photos. We embraced the principle that every guest already had at least one camera with them and that the end goal was to capture memories that could live well beyond the cruise.
UX navigation architecture
The navigation needed to work across multiple devices from mobile phones to large, 4K touch screens. I evolved the concepts from a literal compass to a more abstract version. A side view of the ship is the user’s current context and sits on a left/right timeline of the cruise.
Users can navigate in four directions for different options:
RIGHT: Things I am going to do - shows events users have booked.
LEFT: Things I have already done - memories from the cruise including photos from the user and their travel party as well as previous events and excursions they attended.
DOWN: Things I can do now - explore events, activities, and spaces near me.
UP: Stories of what I have done and what I could do - we use machine learning to connect what we know about users to create a unique, browsable, recommendation experience we called “Constellations” (see below).
Browsing through contextual storytelling
Constellations is an intelligent system that learns from a user’s photos and experiences to create smart recommendations for future travel and purchase experiences. Their Medallion identifies them as they approach an apex screen while the system gathers real-time, recommendations. I created the diagram below as a high-level description to get executive alignment.