Responsibilities
- experience design
- concept development
- UI
- prototyping
Now under construction through 2025, the 800,000 square foot ultra-luxury Waldorf Astoria Residences tower is transforming downtown Miami's skyline. To generate desire and share the progressive vision behind the modern masterpiece, the tower's premier sales gallery aspired to raise the bar for pre-construction sales by elevating the gallery experience.
I worked on this project at Razorfish over the course of several years leading up to the sales launch in 2021. My role as UX designer involved hosting a multi-day stakeholder workshop, collaborative brainstorming, and developing immersive UX strategies that helped brokers tell the story of the building for their guests, highlighted attractions in the surrounding downtown Miami area, and showcased luxurious details and views inside the units.
Impact
The sales gallery launched with a lavish event in June 2021, lauded by the press as one of the largest and most technologically advanced sales galleries in South Florida. The building was scheduled to break ground in late 2023, but sales were so strong that PMG broke ground over a year early.
84% of PMG's sales target was hit in half the projected time.
Overview
Our client, PMG, known for its meticulous execution of large-sale real estate developments, partnered with us to create a totally unique sales experience for pre-construction development. The multi-million dollar budget for the project came with the expectation that the 11,000 square-foot sales gallery communicate abundance, technology and innovation at scale.
Our task was to design a modern sensory sales gallery for prospective buyers to experience how their future in the tower and surrounding areas would materialize and generate desire for purchase.
Challenges
Competition in the luxury real estate market
Miami has always been a playground for the wealthy, and many developers were building for the luxury market. In a crowded landscape of upscale galleries, what could authentically differentiate this sales experience?
Downtown Miami is still developing
Downtown Miami is undergoing an economic and cultural renaissance that isn't fully realized. This sales gallery had to inspire confidence in a wider vision for urban revival, not just ammenities and views inside the tower.
We wanted to prove what makes a landmark remarkable by framing the building as Miami's modern rebel.
How might we...
- inspire emotion through both boldness and substance
- stand out by reframing the sales gallery as an immersive cultural experience
- build trust in a grand vision for Miami's urban renewal
- make preconstruction feel real to generate desire and fuel sales
Discovery
We learned about the opportunity space through secondary research and interviews with PMG stakeholders.
Competitive research
We researched and visited existing luxury sales centers in South Florida to get a baseline understanding of guests' expectations
Focus group insights
We reviewed key insights from our strategy department that emerged from focus group sessions with high-net worth buyers living locally and abroad, interested in investing in South Florida real estate.
Stakeholder workshop
A multi-day workshop convened the real-estate developers, architects and brokers to generate stories and selling points, sketch experiences and brainstorm spatial concepts for the gallery.
Workshop planning and outcomes
The workshop assembled a diverse set of stakeholders representing development, design and sales. The goal was to drive consensus on priorities for the sales center's creative concepts. Our team was especially interested to discover the stories that brokers planned to share about the city, the residences and the buildings' amenities to target buyers who might not be familiar with Miami.
Breakout groups of 4-5 people from different business units brainstormed and documented their ideas through lists, drawings, physical models and collages created with a bespoke kits of parts we brought to stimulate ideas and encourage participation from self-professed "non-creatives."
At the end of each breakout session groups nominated a participants to share their favorite ideas, a strategy intended for stakeholders to take ownership of the output while we simply documented their ideas to compile into a deliverable, the workshop readout.
Guiding principles
We developed a set of guiding experience principles based on recurring themes we heard from workshop participants.
Redundancy
Multiple experiential moments should allow brokers and sales agents to tailor the close by aligning their clients’ interests with the building’s offerings at various touchpoints.
- Designing multiple touchpoints for sales agents and brokers customize their presentations to reinforce key selling points that appeal to their current client
Flexibility
Experiences related to “the future of Miami" should be inherently flexible to highlight what’s good for the tower and omit what’s not, as the future unfolds.
- Building an editable framework to tell stories that can evolve to stay relevant while Miami and the tower concept evolves
- Designing a non-linear flow through the gallery to allow brokers to cater stops on the tour for their clients' needs
Appeal
Sales are driven less by logic, and more by a buyer’s emotional reaction. Their experience at the sales gallery should ignite their desire to live there in the future.
- Designing immersive experiences that speak to both types of buyers: those driven by logic and those driven by emotions.
- Appealing to logic through statistics and scale models that present clear reasons to invest
- Appealing to emotions through aesthetic design and innovative presentations that create a mood
Proof
Inhabiting the model unit is a key moment in the sales center experience, because buyers can experience real evidence of the future firsthand.
- Letting guests step into aspirational spaces that offer tangible evidence of a future within reach
- Using photorealistic imagery and video.
Purity
The building’s architectural form expresses a purity and sense of balance that the sales center can support through similarly themed stories and experiences.
- Laying a foundation of pure neutrals overlaid by pops of color to focus attention
- Simplifying interactions to zero- or 1-touch. Apply presence sensing where appropriate.
Technology
The role of technology in the sales center should be to act as a vehicle that inspires wonder and supports personalized sales. It should not attempt to revolutionize the sales experience by eliminating the human connection.
- Apply technology as a support layer for the humans making the connections integral to real estate transactions
- Giving humans control of their digital experience
Early concepting and design
I worked with a 5-person team of creative directors, art directors and copywriters for the next two weeks to generate more than 20 experiential concepts that aligned business goals with guests' needs.
Conceptual writeups
Our ideas were guided by established experience principles. Each concept was summarized through a writeup and illustration. We collaborated with engineers to vet ideas for feasibility and budget before presenting concepts to stakeholders for review and final selection.
Experience mapping
To present the breadth of work at a glance and help guide stakeholders' decisions about which experiences to approve for design, I plotted all experiences on an experience map. The map included rows to plot corresponding stories, goals, and actions over the guests' visit.
Environment design
The final sales gallery blueprint was still undefined when we ideated an experiential strategy for the user flow. Seeing the opportunity to influence the buildout, we also submitted high-level concept map spaces in a way that supported storytelling at the interactive touch points plotted on the space-agnostic experience map.
Guiding evaluation
We submitted our ideas along with an appendix with suggested criteria to help stakeholders clients prioritize concepts to greenlight. These criteria were rooted in their own success criteria they shared as a team during the workshop.
Prototyping
My focus for the last phase of the project was refining the interaction design for one touchpoint experience called "Welcome to the Neighborhood."
The experience is an interactive map that helps bring Miami’s story and compelling facts to life using overhead projections and an interactive scale model of downtown. The purpose is to empower agents to tell a compelling audio-visual story of a vibrant downtown just outside the building.
Physical form factor and interactivity
To establish a presence in the space and create a theater feel, we arrived through prototyping at a physical design featuring a digital screen mounted above a relief model of downtown Miami. When users turn a knob on the front panel, the screen displays a menu to select and view cultural highlights on screen with the locations visualized as projections on the map below.
The interactive experience gives brokers flexibility to highlight relevant locations based on their clients interests and lifestyles, honoring their time and personalizing the sales experience for each guest.
Visual system flow + wireframes
To visually communicate with clients and design partners about how the digital and physical displays respond to the dial UI, I drafted a branching system flow. This illustrated how people could navigate and view content in different modes.
A set of high-fidelity wireframes allowed us to interactive prototype the flow and evaluate the perceived synchronization and functionality of connected physical and digital components.
Idle mode
The table’s physical design encouraged teamwork by at least two people: one to control the knobs while others placed the robots from any side and art directed together.
Main menu
After waking up. the screen from Idle, select between Tour mode (a short video overview of the city) or Explore mode.
Explore mode
Selecting Explore displays a menu of locations grouped by type (Entertainment, Cultural Attractions, etc) from which users select an option.
Points of Interest detail
Selecting an option starts a video and synchronized projections on the map to tell the story of that attraction. Users can go back to the menu any time by pressing the dial.
Transforming the skyline with an exceptional gallery on the ground.
Launch and press
The multi-million dollar, first-of-its-kind Waldorf Astoria Experiential Sales Gallery opened with a lavish event in June 2021 with important guests including the mayor and cultural figures in attendance. At 11,000 square feet, the press lauded the sales gallery as among the largest and most technologically advanced in South Florida.
"We estimated the sales process to take two years and because of this amazing experience, we actually cut the time in half."
- Ale Castillo, VP of Sales, PMG
“From apps to cryptocurrency, the real estate purchasing process is constantly evolving to better serve the buyer. This is why we invested in creating an innovative, immersive sales experience to showcase the property and the Waldorf brand’s debut into the Miami market. This experiential sales gallery represents our interpretation of the future of Downtown Miami through various activations.”
- Ryan Shear, Managing Partner, PMG