Showcase · 2023
Hotel Entertainment Hub
A white-label in-room entertainment platform that turns the biggest screen in the room into the first thing guests reach for, not the last.
A white-label in-room entertainment platform designed for Empire Hotel. Built during my time at ggCircuit.
The silent competitor
Hotels spend thousands outfitting rooms with entertainment systems that guests never touch. The TV is the biggest screen in the room and the most ignored. At Empire Hotel, I found out why.
I interviewed front desk staff and found a pattern: guests called down three to four times per stay asking how to operate the TV. Not what was on, how to make it work. They had already given up before trying. The system wasn’t failing because of a weak content catalog. It was failing because the first impression was hostile.
Guests arrive tired. They’re in an unfamiliar room. They’re holding a remote they’ve never held before, squinting at a screen across the bed. If the first thing they see doesn’t make sense immediately, they unlock their phone and the TV becomes furniture.
One surface, zero confusion
I designed the interface around one rule: a guest standing at the doorway should understand what’s possible without reading a word. Large tiles. High contrast. No menus behind menus.
Every interaction had to work one-handed, because the other hand is holding a drink, a phone, or a child. Navigation had to be forgiving, because a tired thumb on a remote overshoots. I built the flow so “back” always goes somewhere useful, never to a dead end.
Beyond entertainment
The platform consolidated what hotels typically scatter across six different systems: streaming, room service, spa bookings, local attractions, checkout, and wake-up calls. A guest who came looking for Netflix could discover the spa without hunting through a printed binder. The hotel gained a surface for upselling services without adding friction.
Designed for the moment
Two flows that capture the core experience:
The platform shipped and was deployed at Empire Hotel. No metrics I can share publicly, but the design principle held: when the interface disappears, guests stay in the experience, not in the menu.
Try the prototype
This is the live ProtoPie build. Tap the highlighted hotspots to move through the discovery, booking, and in-room service flows. Press Esc to step back a screen, or R at any time to reset and start over.
