MEETINGS & EVENTS

Overview

Meetings & Events is a Hyatt concept project focused on rethinking the planning and booking experience for business users organizing meetings, conferences, and out-of-office events.

This project began after a platform shift, which created the need to redesign the experience from the ground up. It was an opportunity not only to revisit the page layout and interaction patterns, but also to rethink how users would move through a much more complex booking journey than a standard hotel reservation flow.

Unlike typical leisure guests booking a single room for personal travel, these users were primarily B2B customers and professional planners booking for meetings, team travel, and corporate events. In many cases, they were reserving between 1 and 10 rooms while also considering event-specific requirements such as meeting spaces, group needs, and other logistical details. The challenge was to create a flexible, catch-all interface that could support a wide range of booking scenarios without making the experience feel overwhelming.

The final concept was well received because it brought more clarity and structure to a complex planning process while still fitting within Hyatt’s broader digital ecosystem.

Mid-Fi Mockup Video of the Sketch Prototype used for UserTesting

Goals for This Project

This project was created to replace an existing flow that only supported large events or a separate path for instant booking of meeting spaces.

The goal was to unify those fragmented pathways into a single, more flexible experience that could support multiple guest personas and booking scenarios. Rather than designing for a simple one-room reservation flow, the experience needed to account for users planning business meetings, conferences, and group stays with varying levels of complexity.

A key goal of the project was to better understand the patterns behind how professional users selected venues, compared options, and moved through the decision-making process. The design needed to guide users toward the right path based on their needs while still allowing enough flexibility to accommodate custom-sized events and multiple room requirements.

Another important goal was ensuring that the new experience remained consistent with Hyatt’s broader product ecosystem. While the project was a redesign from the ground up, the interface still had to work within the constraints of Hyatt’s existing UI backend and implementation structure so that the final solution could feel cohesive with other Hyatt offerings.

My Role

As the Lead Product Designer on this project, I was responsible for shaping the end-to-end experience and ensuring all design requirements were clearly defined, documented, and aligned to improve the overall booking process.

My role extended beyond visual design. I had to understand the needs of business-focused users, map complex booking scenarios, and translate those needs into a flexible interface that could support a wide variety of event types. I also had to balance user experience goals with the realities of Hyatt’s platform constraints, making sure the proposed designs were not only intuitive and scalable, but also aligned with the existing backend and UI patterns used across Hyatt’s digital products.

Responsibilities Included

• Collaborated with subject matter experts and stakeholders to understand the business requirements, user expectations, and operational realities of the meetings and events booking flow.
• Analyzed how professional users and event planners selected spaces, evaluated options, and navigated the booking process in order to identify patterns that should shape the experience.
• Defined requirements from a guest’s perspective while ensuring the final direction remained aligned with Hyatt’s broader ecosystem and service offerings.
• Conceptualized and documented the end-to-end user flow across key booking scenarios, including more complex use cases involving multiple rooms and event-specific needs.
• Created low-fidelity, mid-fidelity, and high-fidelity mockups for all core pages, progressively refining the experience from structure to interaction to final visual design.
• Conducted remote and in-person user testing to validate the clarity, flexibility, and usability of the flow.
• Established KPIs to measure success, identify friction points, and guide iteration.
• Ran A/B testing on design concepts to evaluate effectiveness and ensure the project goals were being met.
• Designed responsive layouts that worked across a range of screen sizes while maintaining clarity for a content- and decision-heavy experience.
• Worked within the constraints of Hyatt’s existing UI backend and implementation framework so the final designs could remain consistent with other Hyatt offerings and be more realistic to support in production.

Design Constraints and Considerations

One of the most important aspects of this project was designing for complexity without making the experience feel complicated.

This was not a traditional consumer hotel booking flow. The users for this experience often had more advanced planning needs, more variables to consider, and a stronger need for clarity around options, capacity, and booking paths. The experience needed to be broad enough to support a wide range of event types, but structured enough that users did not feel lost.

At the same time, the design could not be created in isolation. Even though the experience was being reconsidered from the ground up after a platform shift, it still needed to work within the confines of Hyatt’s existing backend systems and UI framework. That meant making thoughtful design decisions that balanced ideal user experience with implementation realities, consistency with other Hyatt products, and the limitations of the supporting platform.

Tools

Design Tools

Sketch, Zeplin, Mural, UserTesting.com

Backend Knowledge

Bootstrap, Hyatt’s design system, Hyatt’s Meetings & Events backend systems

Communication

Slack, RingCentral