ANDAZ REDESIGN

Overview

Andaz Redesign was an internal design hackathon that gave Hyatt’s UX team an opportunity to reimagine what the Andaz brand could look and feel like through a digital experience.

Each Andaz hotel is intentionally one of a kind, shaped by the culture, energy, and character of its destination. That made the challenge more than a visual redesign exercise. The experience needed to communicate a sense of place, personality, and discovery for first-time guests while still supporting the practical goals of exploring the property and moving toward booking.

The project asked us to translate the Andaz brand into a site experience that felt elevated, immersive, and locally inspired rather than generic hospitality marketing. The final concept aimed to entice users to book while also creating a stronger experiential connection between the digital journey and the on-property stay.

Video of the presentation of the Andaz redesign.

Goals for This Project

Product designers were paired into small teams and given a clear understanding of the Andaz brand, its target audience, and its core promises.

The goal was to design a site experience that reflected those values for first-time guests, helping them understand not just what Andaz offers, but what makes the brand feel distinct from a more traditional hotel experience.

The final output was a mid-to-high fidelity concept intended to entice guests to book at Andaz while also connecting the digital experience more experientially to on-property offerings.

Another important objective was to explore how interaction, motion, storytelling, and brand expression could work together in a hospitality experience without losing clarity or usability.

The Problem

The core challenge was translating a highly experiential hospitality brand into a digital format. Andaz is rooted in destination, atmosphere, and individuality, but those qualities can easily become flattened when represented through conventional web patterns.

For first-time guests especially, the site needed to do more than provide information. It needed to communicate the feeling of the brand, create intrigue, and help users imagine the stay before they ever arrived on property.

This meant balancing emotional storytelling with practical user needs, ensuring the experience remained engaging and differentiated while still supporting exploration, understanding, and eventual booking intent.

Research & Strategy

Our team began by grounding ourselves in the Andaz brand and the audience the experience was meant to attract. We explored what signals of luxury, locality, and uniqueness should be expressed digitally, and how those signals could shape the tone, structure, and interaction model of the site.

Using collaborative design studio methods, we generated multiple individual concepts, shared them as a group, and synthesized the strongest ideas into a more cohesive direction. This process helped us move beyond a single designer’s interpretation and arrive at a broader, more intentional point of view for the experience.

Strategy centered on creating a concept that felt immersive and brand-aligned while still being understandable for a first-time visitor. That meant focusing not only on visuals, but also on pacing, storytelling, motion, and how the overall journey would introduce the Andaz brand in a memorable way.

Design Direction

The design direction emphasized atmosphere, editorial storytelling, and a stronger sense of arrival. Rather than relying on standard hospitality layouts alone, the experience was shaped to feel more curated and expressive, helping users connect emotionally with the destination and brand.

Motion and interaction played an important role in reinforcing that feeling. By using prototypes, transitions, and supporting video assets, we explored how the experience could feel more dynamic and premium while guiding users through the content in a way that remained intuitive.

The final concept brought together individually owned sections into a unified experience that presented Andaz as distinctive, aspirational, and experience-driven.

Impact

• Created a stronger digital expression of the Andaz brand by translating its locally inspired, experience-driven identity into an immersive web concept.
• Demonstrated how storytelling, motion, and interaction design could be used together to create a more memorable hospitality experience.
• Produced a mid-to-high fidelity concept that connected brand values more directly to guest exploration and booking interest.
• Helped establish a collaborative design process for rapidly generating, evaluating, and refining concepts within a hackathon format.
• Showcased how individual contributions across a design team could be combined into a cohesive final experience with a consistent point of view.

My Role

I was part of a team of four product designers tasked with reimagining the Andaz digital experience within a condensed hackathon format.

My role involved contributing to concept generation, design critique, interaction thinking, and prototyping, while also helping shape how the final experience would express the Andaz brand through motion, storytelling, and interface design.

Methodologies & Responsibilities

• Conducted design studios using LUMA methodologies to sketch multiple individual concepts and present them to the team.
• Synthesized feedback from peer presentations and incorporated the strongest ideas into iterative design refinements.
• Iterated on selected concepts before developing them further using Sketch, Flinto, Axure, and related tools.
• Evaluated and selected appropriate design and prototyping tools to translate concepts into high-fidelity mockups.
• Designed interaction patterns and page flows, focusing on how users would engage with and experience the site.
• Owned individual sections of the site, which were later assembled into a cohesive final experience.
• Created and edited video assets to support motion, storytelling, and experiential aspects of the mockups.
• Collaborated closely with teammates to maintain consistency in tone, quality, and overall experience direction across the final concept.

Tools

Design Tools

Sketch, Flinto, Anima, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro

Communication

Slack, RingCentral, in-person collaboration