Designing a 3D Tool for Hotel Owners, Not Hotel Guests

When Marriott asked us for an online tool to show how simple it is for hotel owners to join the Four Points Flex conversion brand, the first decision was about the audience. The visitor is not a guest choosing a room. It is an owner weighing up a business decision.

That changes almost every design choice. A guest tool is about desire. An owner tool is about confidence, and the thing an owner needs most is to understand what changes and what does not.

So we built a fully interactive 3D environment, optimised to perform across devices, and paired it with a 2D front end holding the key information about Four Points Flex. The 3D space lets an owner explore a converted room and see the choices for themselves. The 2D pages answer the practical questions in plain terms.

Our principle for a tool like this is a calm interface. Keep controls few and labelled in words, because an owner may open it on an iPad in a meeting and should not have to learn it. Performance across devices is part of the design, since a stuttering model undermines the message that conversion is simple.

There is also a secure backend where Marriott employees log in and manage updates. That matters more than it sounds. A sales tool that cannot be updated by the team using it becomes out of date and stops being trusted, so the editing side got as much attention as the public side.

The tool is built on React Native and Three.js, which gave us a single approach for the interactive scene and the surrounding interface. We wrote up the technical build earlier, so here the point is the design thinking: work out who is deciding, then remove everything that does not help them decide.

You can try the Hotel Conversion Tool among our demos, and read about the wider Marriott relationship on its project page. If you have a complex offer that needs to feel simple, we would like to hear about it.