As Head of Design, I lead a team of designers, animators and copywriters to create the Creative Direction and Product Design of Hoken — a sinew between luxury and utility, and the first ever experience for tokenization (buying and selling) of hotel rooms.

As a player-coach founding designer: I defined the entire aesthetic world of Hoken's visual, audible, and legible touch points

Hoken is a first of its kind Hotel room selling & buying marketplace. I leaned heavily into web3 practices while bringing clear and concise UX to a brand new experience that has never existed for a user: a Stub-hub for hotel rooms at some of the hottest events in the US.

+ Creative Direction, Brand Guidelines, Brand Voice + Full Design System + Presentations & Pitch Decks for partnerships and investors

+ UI/UX and Architecture for Responsive Web app + Clickable Prototypes + E-commerce landing pages + Advertisements — Video, Google Ads, Social + Hired and scaled a Global design team

How do you make a user experience that has yet to exist?

The complexity of designing a brand new user experience for something humans have not done yet cannot be overstated! The boldest places I sought to look were trading platforms but we desperately needed to simplify our functionality to fit the regular consumer. I was lucky enough to work with Cordell Ratzlaff, the User Experience Director of Google and the maker of many things Apple OS + to relying heavily on my experience having bought and sold NFTs in the web3 space. Testing and iteration cannot be overstate, there was lots of getting it wrong, and lots of finding the path to making it right, while balancing many stakeholder opinions. With a growing customer base, we got there!

Buying & Selling

Lots of iteration and lots of user testing, there were the first sights of turnover, the successful purchase and selling of a hotel room.

Historically, folks would use back channels like Facebook, Craiglist and Reddit to sell previously booked hotel rooms. Now, they finally had a source (albeit centric to heavily trafficked events for now!) to, dare I say, flip hotel rooms.

The brand persona...who is she?

she is

Concise Enterprising Audacious

She knows what she wants, how to get it, and most importantly, how to hook you up.

Users and customers should feel like Hoken is at the forefront of something exciting, but not so far away that it feels unreachable. They should feel safe and looked-after, while also knowing Hoken is the key to exclusive content and access they couldn’t get elsewhere. Hoken is here to help. But it just so happens it’s also the cool kid on the playground.

A truly rare combo. ;)

Hype. Spontaneous. Anticipated. All access. One-of-one. Flexible. Exclusive. Backstage. In-the-moment. Inspiring. Unlocked.