Lyric Shifting the Paradigm — Anthony Stimola

Working with Lyric

Create the guest experience and shift an organizational paradigm of “operations light” to support it.

The Solution
Get in the field, in person, and run a series of experiments to learn how to holistically create positive impact on the guest experience. The hypothesis—a human-centered guest experience will increase revenue, guest scores, and empower in-market staff.

The Process
I led the team through live prototyping in both properties over the course of 3 months. The team was not prototyping as a form of validation, but rather as a tool to surface new insights and learnings. We design with the intention to stand up an experiment, not to perfect it. Embracing a “good enough to learn from” approach to designing. Folding our learnings into the next round of prototypes.

Client
Lyric

Industry
Hospitality

Team
UX Lead & Senior Design Manager / Anthony Stimola

Head of Partnerships & Strategy / Michael Quinn
3D Design & Interior Design / Irene Yu
Operations Strategy & Development / Nate Randall
Senior Director / Nicole Bernstein
Designer / Alicia Pompeii

Press
Forbes—Airbnb Leads $160 Million Investment Into Hospitality Startup Lyric

Live prototyping to learn.

Learning in real time, and designing the guest experience.

This entire body of work was kicked off by two rounds of live prototyping that the team did in two of our brightest properties. The first property located in New Orleans, which was entirely Lyric guests, and the second property located in Philadelphia, which was a mixed use building.

Our team was setting out to define and design Lyric’s guest experience. In order to do so we looked at several key moments:

Provisions (or some kind of guest pantry)
Lobby Experience
Arrival Experience
Building Community

The team spoke with guests and residence to acquire realtime feedback and insights about the prototypes. Additionally, End of Stay Scores were used as data points to help further the work.

With increased scores and a lot of positive feedback, it was clear that the work was beginning to shape the guest experience. However we learned on the back end we needed to better understand the day-to-day life of our in-market Lyric staff.

Outcome/Impact

NPS Scores up by 8% [70% to 78%]
Average Reviews up by .22pts [4.66 to 4.88*]

[*5pt Scale]

Conducting ethnographic research.

Understanding the industry landscape and how to execute our offering.

External Research
[Understanding the landscape]

Myself and the team sat down to have conversations with:

GM of St. Regis in San Francisco
GM of The W in San Francisco
GM of The Wing in San Francisco
GM of The Four Seasons Restaurant in Philadelphia

* An additional two conversations were held with a mix of avid business travelers

This was all done to gain a deeper understanding for how hospitality organizations staff properties and how they utilize the staff to support the guest experience.

Internal Research
[visual below]

I sat down with our teams in-market to map out what their day looks like. Answering questions about roles, responsibilities, and the reality of what it takes to bring the product offering to life.

Next, our CXO team sent my team data for all in-bound calls during the days we were in-market. Mapping that data against the learnings surfaced during the interviews my team was able to present, for the first time, a clear picture of operational needs.