ROYAL CARIBBEAN CASE STUDY
To create a frictionless arrival allowing guests to get from “car-to-bar” in less than 10 minutes
CHALLENGE
Reduced ship embarkation from 90 minutes to 3 minutes
outcome
Led Product Strategy with a team of 3 engineers, 2 designers, and 2 product managers
ROLE
We didn’t have to explain to Royal Caribbean the value of experience design — it’s been at the core of their business from the beginning! We work closely with their digital innovation team to experiment with how technology can usher in the next generation of guest experiences.
We worked through an innovation backlog consisting of new technologies (including VR, facial recognition, Apple Watch, and beacons) and existing friction points, quickly working through possibilities to find and refine the best solutions.
There are few things more exciting than arriving for your cruise vacation, but unfortunately, it can be a grueling 90-minute process that can take multiple days to unwind from. Our stakeholder had the vision to make the experience frictionless.
DISCOVERY
We needed to understand the guests’ pain points upon arrival for their vacation. To begin the discovery phase we started with research to analyze each step of the process. Once we understood the effort, data points, and length of time per step, we began to ideate. Using the diverge-and-converge collaboration method we came up with several ideas to eliminate unnecessary steps.
I facilitated a creative workshop to design a new physical experience where guests could walk straight from their car right onto the ship. We knew the ship manifest was extremely critical to document each guest accurately for international customs so we needed to figure out how we could verify individual guests, as well as parties traveling together.
DESIGN
We made several prototype iterations spanning mobile apps, motion graphics, iPad apps, kiosk experiences, and service blueprints. This included Interaction design, UI design, information design, motion design, service design, hardware prototyping, and facial recognition prototyping.
DEVELOP
We built this with facial recognition, beacons, iOS (Swift), Ruby on Rails, Angular, and Python.
“As Far as we’re concerned, it couldn’t have gone any better.”
– Joey Hasty, Royal Caribbean Head of Innovation
RESULTs
We reduced ship embarkation time from 90 minutes to 3 minutes
Our technology was featured at a major press event with 95% effectiveness
Designed a sophisticated fall-back system using multiple cameras and facial recognition systems to improve effectiveness after Royal did not think the program would be viable
Determined correct technical solutions for hardware cameras and software for facial recognition
Carefully crafted handoff materials for the internal team
Frictionless Arrival is now live in multiple global ports including their flagship Miami port
