Creating a concept for a hotel room of tomorrow for Hotel Haaga Central Park
As Project Lead of a team of four, I designed a concept for the hotel room of tomorrow for Hotel Haaga Central Park, whose two suites had become outdated. Built on research, new customer segments and prototypes tested with customers, the concept is designed to create value for the hotel, raise guest satisfaction and well-being, and offer new products, services and experiences. The hotel was very happy with it when we presented it.
Context
Hotel Haaga Central Park is a small, independent, wellness-focused hotel in Helsinki. It has 120 rooms and two suites, meeting rooms and event spaces, a wide range of wellness services, and it is Green Key certified and Sustainable Travel Finland recognized for its sustainable practices. The hotel is said to be for people who want to relax, live comfortably and tread their own paths.
Its two suites had become outdated. We were asked for a concept for the room of tomorrow that would create value for the hotel, raise guest satisfaction and well-being, and offer new products, services and experiences. We were also asked us to identify new customer segments and to create personas and customer journeys for them. We were to deliver a full concept book describing the room's functions and design ideas, and presenting the new segments, personas and journeys. It was also meant to help produce creative content for the Finnish Hotel of Tomorrow 2.0 project, which this was part of.
The challenge: bring two outdated suites into the future with a concept that creates value for the hotel and its guests and speaks to new customer segments.
4 months in 2024, with a team of four with me as the Project Lead.
Service design, literature search, market & trend review, benchmarking, survey, interviews, ideation, brainstorming, prototyping, testing
Affinity diagram, Lotus blossom, Brainwriting, How might we, Value proposition canvas, Customer journey map, Business model canvas, Service blueprint, Moodboard, Figma, Gantt Chart
Quick navigation
Understanding
Survey
We began with a survey to learn what guests value in a hotel room. It covered who they are, why and how often they stay, what influences their choice of hotel, and how important different features are to them. Open questions asked about their best and most memorable hotel room experiences, what annoys them or is missing, what they wish rooms offered, and how they picture the hotel room of the future. Finally, we asked them to rate how important given features are and how likely they would be to use them.
Research & benchmarking
In the weeks after the visit, we deepened our understanding with desk research and a literature search, using AI to find recent, relevant sources and keywords. We studied wellness and well-being, wellness tourism and its trends, Green Key certification, the hotel and its customer reviews on other platforms, and the hospitality trends, megatrends and innovation shaping the industry. We benchmarked creative hotels in Finland and abroad, and explored Gen Z and Millennials as potential new customer segments, using AI-suggested hashtags across Google, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
Hotel visit & interviews
We then visited the hotel and during a tour of the premises we asked questions, made observations, took photos and notes, recorded discussions with permission, and measured the suite. Afterwards we interviewed the two key persons to understand the hotel's current situation and what it wanted from the project: how it markets and sells the suites, its occupancy, length of stays and reservation process, who its guests are and what data it could share, what was driving the project, and what limits applied. We also asked which features guests like and dislike, how the hotel differentiates itself, and which challenges and trends it sees ahead.
Expert interviews
We met Ari Björkqvist, author of the 2009 publication Concepting the Hotel of Tomorrow, for an in-person, semi-structured interview. We had read his work on the rooms he designed and wanted his insights. We also interviewed three industry experts, two interior designers and a lighting expert, about design and lighting in hotel room experiences and about the future. To add qualitative depth to the survey, we interviewed people about how well the hotel brand was recognised and asked them to describe their own idea of the hotel room of tomorrow.
Direction
Gathering insights
We had a hands-on workshop where we created preliminary profiles with an "I am – I want – What annoys me" model on Post-its, sketched a quick customer journey on paper, identified issues, and developed solutions for the two biggest issue areas by drawing, using Post-its and Lego. The exercises showed us weaknesses and opportunities at different stages of the journey, strengthened the themes and criteria that had started to form during our research, and gave us our first design drivers.
Next we analysed the survey results. The same themes kept coming up, and the basis for the concept grew stronger. Each of us went through our research and wrote the key points on Post-its, keeping only the most relevant and most recurring insights, which we could judge because we had done the research ourselves.
Before the next meeting I visited the hotel again to see and document the second suite, which had been booked during our first visit. I drew the route from reception to the room, got a floor layout to support the customer journeys, and went through the Green Key folder, which existed only in print, to learn the hotel's current sustainability practices. I photographed the main insights for later.
Working through the data
We spent a full day at the Oodi library working through all the data together. We began with the Affinity Diagram: we wrote the Post-its still missing, put almost 300 on a wall and read them aloud one by one, so the recurring themes became clear as we heard them return. Then each of us named a category and collected the related notes under it on a second wall, so we would not collect the same ones twice. Examples were sleep, room design and sustainability. We kept similar categories side by side, and continued until every note that fit somewhere had a place and the rest were filtered out.
The Affinity Diagram worked well for gathering and sorting a large amount of data, but many insights fit several categories, so for the next level we switched to the Lotus Blossom, which handles how things connect. Placing related themes around each main category, we arrived at six design drivers that all our categories fit under. We later digitized both Affinity Diagram and Lotus Blossom findings.
Drafting customer segments and profiles
The following week we gave ChatGPT the digitised Affinity Diagram data to draft customer segments and profiles. They were a solid foundation, and we built them into profiles in Figma. We noticed that none matched one of the segments in our design drivers, so we ran a second prompt. We also dropped one technology focused profile, since our research showed technology is by now a natural part of everyone's life, and folded its relevant elements into the others. We edited the names and descriptions, added keywords, age groups and frustrations, and made a persona card template (name, age, location, biography, motivations and frustrations) for specific personas under each profile. AI sped up the pattern recognition, and since we had done the research ourselves, we could judge whether its suggestions held up.
Before the ideation phase, we met on Teams to turn all this into clear project criteria, motives and problems, and made the preliminary profiles into printed profile cards with backstories, to build comprehension and empathy later.
Development
Ideation
With the insights in place, we booked a space with whiteboards to draw on. We began by brainstorming on one whiteboard anything that came to mind about the concept, partly based on our research and partly new. On another board we divided the space into five phases to guide our thinking and built ideas under each: pre-experience, arrival, room design, services and products, and post-experience. Then we wiped the first board and used it for Brainwriting combined with How Might We. We wrote nine How Might We questions, and each of us started in our own section, writing one idea and then moving on to build on someone else's. Each of us used a different pen colour so we could see where to continue. The whiteboards let us see the big picture and the details at a glance, step back, and move closer again. We could all work at once on several entities that supported each other, and we returned to our materials to add what we had missed. The sections and questions gave our thinking context, which makes generating ideas easier.
Next we created customer journey maps, first a wide one from pre-experience to post-experience and then a narrower one for the room itself, with stages, activities, touchpoints, thoughts and emotions, and pains and gains. We built on them together until we had nothing more to add, and planned the materials for the prototyping day. We didn't need a separate filtering phase, because we had filtered all along during different phases and the important points rose and the rest dropped away. Because the same themes kept coming up across all our sources, the direction of the concept was clear early on.
Building prototypes
We then built our prototypes, with a large variety of supplies we had brought. We made three prototypes. One was a mock-up of the hotel room, for which we made the walls and cut cardboard pieces for furniture and decorative elements, with blank pieces for guests to add what was missing. We wanted to see which designs different people preferred so we could combine the best into one ideal room, and the choices let us validate our research insights and the image we had in mind.
Two were new ideas, and we wanted to know whether there was truly a need for them. They were drawn and written on paper, glued onto cardboard and joined with metal wires so the pages could be flipped while presenting. We had also the printed our customer profiles so each participant could pick the one that fit them best.
Testing with customers
We invited people to a team member's office for testing, with 15-minute slots and 15 minutes in between to reset. Each session followed the same order. We introduced ourselves, the project and the flow, participants chose the profile they related to most. Then they decorated the cardboard room as their ideal hotel room, and finally chose their favourite colours and materials. Lastly we presented the two solutions asking for feedback and thoughts. The 15-minute limit kept the choices intuitive. One of us guided, one took notes and the others took photos.
The process stayed flexible during the day, we iterated one of the two solutions based on what customers told us, and added the elements the room was missing. Afterwards we collected the insights from the photos and marked the chosen colours and materials to see which were most popular and how they compared with our research. We went through the results the same day. Many of the colours the customers chose ended up in the materials and palette we selected. We also added colours we believed would work best and left out some that would not, and put the chosen palette together as a collage to guide our concept finalisation, mood boards and visual details.
Concept development
Point-of-View
The following week we agreed how to finalise the concept as one cohesive whole, based on the ideation, the testing and everything we had learned. For each of our customer profiles we wrote a Point-of-View statement showing the customer's goals, pain points and values, grounded in our research and validated through the prototype testing and customer feedback.
Value Proposition Canvas
Next we made a Value Proposition Canvas for each customer segment. We filled the customer side (gains, pains, jobs), adding what had come up in testing, and then the company side (gain creators, pain relievers, products and services). Some segments filled out easily, while others showed where the concept needed more work to answer each segment's needs.
Service Blueprint
Finally, we made a service blueprint showing the whole service delivery from the guest's side and the operational processes behind it. It helped us see which touchpoints need staff training and coordination, clarified the roles and responsibilities of the staff, and showed where additional amenities or personalised services could be added.
Business Model Canvas
We then filled in the Business Model Canvas in Figma. Much of it came easily from our insights, but key activities, key resources, key partners, cost structure and revenue streams took the most thinking, since we were only now detailing the concept at that level. The canvas focused on the concept and its key features, and it showed us where gaps remained. We ideated the value propositions with ChatGPT by asking it to draft them for each customer profile from our earlier data. We got two suggestions for each and used them to write our own versions.
Customer Journey Maps
We then finalised the customer journey maps we had sketched during ideation, in Figma, first from pre-experience to post-experience and then for the room itself. We combined the most relevant insights from earlier versions and added what was missing. We chose a broader level of detail, with four to five stages and more actions under each, as a starting point the hotel can keep building on when it implements the concept and learns from its guests.
Outcome
We brought everything together in a concept book that gives the hotel a complete picture of the room of tomorrow: who it is for, what guests experience, how it looks and what it costs. It introduces the concept and the customer insights, segments and journeys behind it. It then moves on to the amenities, services and technology, sustainability, accessibility, plant care and brand integration. It also covers the floor plan and layout, the colour and material palettes and interior design elements, and finally the cost estimates and budget considerations. Our research backs up the suggestions.
To make the design tangible, we created 13 mood boards covering the entryway, bathroom, toilet, bedroom and other living areas. Built on colour themes from our research, example fabrics and interior design elements, they gave the hotel a preview of the atmosphere of the future rooms.
The hotel received the 50-page concept book both digitally, with all the links, and as a physical copy. Alongside it came our 100-page process description with all the research insights, tools and appendices, so they could see how everything progressed and what the concept is built on.
The concept was designed to open the hotel to new customer segments, which we expected to bring more customers and bookings, support a higher room price and increase profit. When we presented it, the hotel was very happy with the concept and felt it fit well with the hotel and the direction it wanted to take it in.
I had the incredible opportunity to work closely with Minka on our service design project where she was the project lead. From the very start, Minka’s passion for service design was evident and absolutely infectious. Her enthusiasm not only drove the project forward but also inspired everyone on the team to give their best.
Minka has a remarkable talent for seeing the big picture while meticulously managing tiny details. Her systematic approach to project management ensured that we stayed on track and met all our deadlines. I was constantly amazed by her ability to anticipate challenges and find creative solutions.
She truly understands the importance of putting the user first and crafted service solutions that were both innovative and highly effective. Her insights often sparked new ideas and directions, making our final deliverables superior.
Minka is a fantastic person to work with. Her positive attitude, willingness to help, and genuine care for her teammates made the project not just successful, but also enjoyable. She has a unique ability to make everyone feel valued and heard, which fostered a collaborative and supportive team environment.
I wholeheartedly recommend Minka for any role in service design. Any organization would be lucky to have her on their team, and I’m confident she will continue to achieve great things.
Anh Hoang, team member
See other case stories
